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.

Abacus
Poems

In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping

shower steam kept us invisible,

but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.

Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.

Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts

in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged

 

her ruler, and we printed the same confession

a hundred times, her shadow crossing

our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old

spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped

locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.

Heather gave birth so often she forgot,

she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost

in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye

 

in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.

Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,

how we strolled, arms linked, singing,

into the world of women where all deaths begin.

Reading the Water
Poems

A planeload of insurance salesmen, blown off course,

Discovers a tribe who believe an elephant-

In-the-distance is the same size as a gnat-in-the-eye.

 

This should cause trouble in a hunt. But tribespeople

Merely flick the pesky trumpeter away,

While the gnat – felled by clouds of arrows – feeds

 

The tribe for weeks. Faced by a lion, tribesmen run

Until its head is small enough to squish. Muscular

Warriors are found dead, pierced by mosquito-needles

 

Ear-to-ear. Everything here is as it seems.

The stick-in-water, drawn out, remains crooked

As a boomerang. Mountain and molehill are identical.

 

Tragedies that crush Americans – love’s waterbed

Popping, parents dropped into the scalding pot of age-

Require only that the sufferer walk away. “It’s not so awful,”

 

Tribal healers say. “With every step, troubles shrink;

Their howling dwindles to a buzz; their fangs shrivel to the size

Of pollen grains. Reach out. Brush them away. You see?”

Transactions in a Foreign Currency
Stories

While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One

The Ecstatic
A Novel

My sister was enrolled in a beauty pageant for virgins, a contest I thought she could win. She was cute enough, but also, how many teenage hymens were left in America anymore? Even the emu-faced girls had been initiated by twelve. Fewer contestants fueled better odds.

 

- You might actually win, I told Nabisase.

 

- I’m glad that this surprises you, she said.

At the Damascus Gate
Short Hallucinations

WOMAN 2: The first time I saw the devil was in the desert thirty-five kilometers north of Shaarm, a multi-national army base. The devil first appeared to me in the form of a huge scorpion but it took on many forms during our brief encounter, some of them insect, some of them human, and once as a desert turkey, which I came to prefer. The roof of meaning, at any rate, was gone.

Abacus
Poems

In the locker room we unhooked our bras, hoping

shower steam kept us invisible,

but our souls showed, our prepubescent fuzz.

Stockings hung from shower rods like biblical snakes.

Who would learn first? we wondered, and drew breasts

in goofy loops until Sister Angelica banged

 

her ruler, and we printed the same confession

a hundred times, her shadow crossing

our spiral notebooks, her eyes like old

spiders. Ginnie learned and got a heart-shaped

locket, then a shotgun wedding ring.

Heather gave birth so often she forgot,

she said, what caused it. Becky’s womb was lost

in an abortionist’s garage. We said good-bye

 

in the Immaculate Conception parking lot.

Still, nuns click their beads in memory of us,

how we strolled, arms linked, singing,

into the world of women where all deaths begin.

Reading the Water
Poems

A planeload of insurance salesmen, blown off course,

Discovers a tribe who believe an elephant-

In-the-distance is the same size as a gnat-in-the-eye.

 

This should cause trouble in a hunt. But tribespeople

Merely flick the pesky trumpeter away,

While the gnat – felled by clouds of arrows – feeds

 

The tribe for weeks. Faced by a lion, tribesmen run

Until its head is small enough to squish. Muscular

Warriors are found dead, pierced by mosquito-needles

 

Ear-to-ear. Everything here is as it seems.

The stick-in-water, drawn out, remains crooked

As a boomerang. Mountain and molehill are identical.

 

Tragedies that crush Americans – love’s waterbed

Popping, parents dropped into the scalding pot of age-

Require only that the sufferer walk away. “It’s not so awful,”

 

Tribal healers say. “With every step, troubles shrink;

Their howling dwindles to a buzz; their fangs shrivel to the size

Of pollen grains. Reach out. Brush them away. You see?”

Transactions in a Foreign Currency
Stories

While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One

The Ecstatic
A Novel

My sister was enrolled in a beauty pageant for virgins, a contest I thought she could win. She was cute enough, but also, how many teenage hymens were left in America anymore? Even the emu-faced girls had been initiated by twelve. Fewer contestants fueled better odds.

 

- You might actually win, I told Nabisase.

 

- I’m glad that this surprises you, she said.

At the Damascus Gate
Short Hallucinations

WOMAN 2: The first time I saw the devil was in the desert thirty-five kilometers north of Shaarm, a multi-national army base. The devil first appeared to me in the form of a huge scorpion but it took on many forms during our brief encounter, some of them insect, some of them human, and once as a desert turkey, which I came to prefer. The roof of meaning, at any rate, was gone.