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.

Watusi Titanic
Poems

I’ll make you a saint

from an unblemished code book

that must be read

 

in a German restaurant

where beer is served in glasses

wrapped in brown leather

 

when the cuckoo strikes twelve

this will be the moment

of ascension

Ordinary Girls
A Memoir

“You know I’m gonna pay you back,” my mother said, then winked at him.

       He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her, just like that. “Gracias,” she said, then headed inside.

        She was always like this, learning my friends’ names, getting familiar enough to ask for money, or cigarettes, or drugs. It would be this way into my late teens, when I’m grown, when I’m a woman. It was like I was the only one getting older, changing. But Mami, she was frozen in time as that twenty-year-old who listened to Madonna and thought my father was running around on her, still haunted by those same monsters, and even years after we’d left Puerto Rico, she believed we still owned the house in Luquillo, the liquor store, that we would go back there, pick up right where we left off. That it would all be waiting for us to get back.

Notes for My Body Double
Poems

…what of the glowing spine,

what of the toy stings of stock footage flames,

what of the jets you swatted dead

from the air with unmistakable joy,

you of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh,

you of the palsied fury, you

of the put-upon by dissemblers and disturbers,

you, what of the life burned

so cheaply into celluloid we are charmed…

TwERK
Poems

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.

                            hyphy dancehall — no can

               hear tings demur.

titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer

whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.

                            ain’t neck breaking like dutty

               when she whine.

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?

Trick Mirror
Reflections on Self-Delusion

What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity.

I'm Always So Serious: Poems

        The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails


        as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of


        this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know


        close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.

Watusi Titanic
Poems

I’ll make you a saint

from an unblemished code book

that must be read

 

in a German restaurant

where beer is served in glasses

wrapped in brown leather

 

when the cuckoo strikes twelve

this will be the moment

of ascension

Ordinary Girls
A Memoir

“You know I’m gonna pay you back,” my mother said, then winked at him.

       He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her, just like that. “Gracias,” she said, then headed inside.

        She was always like this, learning my friends’ names, getting familiar enough to ask for money, or cigarettes, or drugs. It would be this way into my late teens, when I’m grown, when I’m a woman. It was like I was the only one getting older, changing. But Mami, she was frozen in time as that twenty-year-old who listened to Madonna and thought my father was running around on her, still haunted by those same monsters, and even years after we’d left Puerto Rico, she believed we still owned the house in Luquillo, the liquor store, that we would go back there, pick up right where we left off. That it would all be waiting for us to get back.

Notes for My Body Double
Poems

…what of the glowing spine,

what of the toy stings of stock footage flames,

what of the jets you swatted dead

from the air with unmistakable joy,

you of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh,

you of the palsied fury, you

of the put-upon by dissemblers and disturbers,

you, what of the life burned

so cheaply into celluloid we are charmed…

TwERK
Poems

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.

                            hyphy dancehall — no can

               hear tings demur.

titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer

whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.

                            ain’t neck breaking like dutty

               when she whine.

               titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.

thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?

Trick Mirror
Reflections on Self-Delusion

What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity.

I'm Always So Serious: Poems

        The husband joins his wife near the olive
shaded lamp and quails


        as his raving lover seizes the neck of
the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of


        this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines
bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know


        close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.