Whiting Award Winners

Brown talks about what made him reconsider his relationship to religious faith, why poets are like preachers, and how poetry saved his life.

Singapore Unbound reviews Brown's The New Testament, praising the collection's lyrical, prayer-like quality and writing, "Brown's collection, I believe, is a beautiful testament to this in action: if one lives, prays, and reveals one's true face, extraordinary changes can be made."

Alarcón was honored for his work with groundbreaking Spanish language podcast Radio Ambulante, and said of the honor, "The best praise you can give me is to call me a narrator."

In her first short story collection, Lacey explores characters coming to terms with breakups, abandonment, and strained family ties. A woman leaves her dead husband’s clothing on the street, only for it to reappear on the body of a stranger; a man reads his ex-wife’s short story and neurotically contemplates whether it is about him. The Chicago Tribune says the collection is full of "devastating epiphanies."

Whiting winner Rinne Groff talks about her new play at the Public Theater, Fire in Dreamland, and the very human longing for escape that motivates her characters.

Hayes discusses how the sonnet form drove his latest collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins, and rule-breaking in poetry.

In a new poem for Hyperallergic, McCrae's narrator muses: " I see folks’     Gods whenever I see their faces/ But God don’t look like anybody here/ For me     God is a woman     and Her face is/ Black as a bright black stone."

"Some nights I wake/ and everything hurts/ a little. It is/ amazing how long/ a ruined thing/ will burn." In a new work for Poets.org, Guest tackles pain, loss, and memory.

"She was one of those people—the kind to create an Excel spreadsheet of everything she owned and send it to him." In Wang's story for the New Yorker, complexities bubble beneath the surface of a couple's sushi dinner in Harlem.

J.D. Daniels talks self-plagiarism, Daniel Barenboim, and science fiction in a series of letters with fellow writer Barry N. Malzberg.

Congrats to Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, whose novel Call Me Zebra "represents some of the best that Indiana literature has to offer."

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi discusses her novel Call Me Zebra and why she believes  "Writing is an act of communication, a gesture of affection and empathy toward others, a form of call & response."

“Forever ends. Never a moment holds/ ‘still-here,’ when sand murmurs through my fingers.” In a new poem for Poets.org, Hutchinson’s narrator muses on life and death.

The Times calls Offutt’s second work of fiction “dark, but deeply humane” and declares the noir novel “an achievement of spellbinding momentum and steadfast heart.”

Mansour talks about her new play, The Vagrant Trilogy, and why it’s important to her that audiences hear Arabic and “see Arabic in daily life and not just news events.”

Lambda Literary calls Koestenbaum’s latest, a follow up to his Pink Trance Notebooks, an “existential cotton candy cloud spun big as life.”

Whiting winner Dan Chiasson reviews the new poetry collection by fellow winner Hayes, calling American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins "one of the deepest accounts I have read in poetry of what it feels like to have one’s body fetishized as an object but criminalized as a force."

The Tribune calls Wang “a visionary,” writing that her novel about a burned-out Ph.D. candidate pondering her Chinese heritage and an upcoming marriage “has crafted a narrative that manages to be both restrained and explosive.”

The magazine writes that Koestenbaum’s latest collection “mixing conscious states like color” and declares that, “for Koestenbaum, art is no therapy or escape. It simply tags along, delivering beauty un-deliberated.”

The LA Review of Books writes that Pico’s latest is full of “poems that are complex yet accessible, that sound like 2018 but that have staying power long past it,” comparing the poet to Frank O’Hara.

Jonathan Farmer discusses how the latest book differs from McCrae’s previous work, meditates on his relationship to the book as a white reader, and praises the “power” of McCrae’s poems.

In The Nation, writer J. Robert Lennon pens a moving tribute to Johnson’s life and his final collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. "It wasn’t that his books failed to conform to expectations,” Lennon writes. “It was that his talent was too slippery to set them in the first place."

"It’s as though racism has always been the action and dealing with it the reaction," Pinckney reflects in his New York Review of Books piece on Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornell West, and afro-pessimism.