Whiting Award Winners

Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.

In the Belly
Poems

There’s a kind of sky below the ocean –

a field of starfish, turning slowly

like cogs inside

a water-watch, wound by a sea river;

the star’s five fingers tremble and

reach for a clam’s book of meat,

into which it will inject a sedative

and then its stomach.

 

In The City, escaped parrots colonize

a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that

In a bag? More hits after this…

The Broom of the System
A Novel

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.

The Ice at the Bottom of the World
Stories

We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.

Punching Out
One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.

House of Heroes
And Other Stories

My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”

 

At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular.

The New Yorker (June 16 and 23, 2003)

The last visitor left.

You closed the door and smiled at me.

I watched you cross Room 515 through

the flowers in vases, and your face

looked just like your face, smiling

down at me in my stupid green issue gown.

I felt myself want you

through the plastic tubes, 

the vines around, across and above me.

I felt myself want you

exclusively. Even pain faded

into the scenery as you leaned in

to kiss me. And I met your kiss

with my lips and we were both

folded into it,

into that clean clean folding,

that soft longed-for kiss

across the side rails. That particular kiss

in its delicious oblivion hoisted us

above the suffering body.

We felt that long transfer of soft

for softness, that kiss lifting us

above the basement drawers

where we would finally face up.

In the Belly
Poems

There’s a kind of sky below the ocean –

a field of starfish, turning slowly

like cogs inside

a water-watch, wound by a sea river;

the star’s five fingers tremble and

reach for a clam’s book of meat,

into which it will inject a sedative

and then its stomach.

 

In The City, escaped parrots colonize

a hilltop and breed, cackling You want that

In a bag? More hits after this…

The Broom of the System
A Novel

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.

The Ice at the Bottom of the World
Stories

We at school knew Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.

Punching Out
One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.

House of Heroes
And Other Stories

My job here is a strange one. The description I found in the classifieds read: “Overnight counselor-in-residence for developmentally disabled teenagers with behavior problems.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But it went on to read: “Some meal preparation required; counselor is able to sleep during shift.”

 

At the time it seemed that it might suit me, the sleeping part in particular.

The New Yorker (June 16 and 23, 2003)

The last visitor left.

You closed the door and smiled at me.

I watched you cross Room 515 through

the flowers in vases, and your face

looked just like your face, smiling

down at me in my stupid green issue gown.

I felt myself want you

through the plastic tubes, 

the vines around, across and above me.

I felt myself want you

exclusively. Even pain faded

into the scenery as you leaned in

to kiss me. And I met your kiss

with my lips and we were both

folded into it,

into that clean clean folding,

that soft longed-for kiss

across the side rails. That particular kiss

in its delicious oblivion hoisted us

above the suffering body.

We felt that long transfer of soft

for softness, that kiss lifting us

above the basement drawers

where we would finally face up.