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.
Mano’s job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river’s upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn’t notice how filthy things were getting in there.
One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She’d named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning system. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too.
From a side lane soft with lunar mulch
and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone
on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties
as wide as an elephant’s forehead.
I sighed across the boy-mown lawn
and they shook as though they shed blessings
to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.
Who would dare pour such panties
along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.
The Milky Way was pavement
compared to their luxury. I knew
I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.
Next morning my feet felt like mallets.
I was back in the world where people
wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,
and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.
By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².
It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.
I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.
In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³
I note the absence of the word “Arab.”
Still, they do not sense us⁴.
Some of the subjects covered during Gamal’s hour of talk: the great friendship they will have; the difficulty Gamal has accepting Ib’s name—he prefers to call him Ibrahim; the movies of Kaleemt Ishtwud; the language of Arabic, which Gamal will make Ib speak like one good Arab Man, which Gamal says is the language everyone in the world knows; felucca rides on the Nile; the English language, the greatest language on earth, which Ib will teach Gamal to speak like on good English Man; this great beauty the singer Paula Abdul, but what is she a servant of (abdul means “servant of”) and how can we make her visit our house which we will build together near the Pyramids; the Pyramids, which Gamal feels one moment are the great monuments of the world we know, the next moment, garbage heaps, where bad people sell bad things that do not make Egypt look good; the right of a man to marry a woman for a few weeks, a very necessary right, men are much stronger and fairer this way, men grow beards more quickly, men walk in straight lines.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
The dining room was empty. There were dragons – dragon ashtrays, dragon statues, dragons carved into posts. In a remarkably misguided attempt at décor, there was also a profusion of mirrors. The result was upsetting.
Mano’s job at the water treatment plant was easy and relentlessly boring—most days she wondered why they kept a receptionist at all. The water treatment facility was spared the public wrath of, say, the utilities department, where citizens regularly marched themselves down in person to shout about their bills. Nobody came to the water treatment office. People rarely called. She sipped the coffee while watching a few trout glide behind the glass of the tank that took up half the wall opposite her desk. Trout did better in the river’s upper sections, where the water was colder, but they could be found in the river down here as well, and Lloyd insisted on having a few in the office tank. Recently, the city had cut the budget for the tank service contractor, and she and Keith had both been pretending they didn’t notice how filthy things were getting in there.
One way Mano passed the time was to spend hours, on-the-clock, with her oil pastels, working to capture the rosy blush of trout gills, the way the red stripe along the side of the greenbacks faded in and out, almost woven through the deep green-brown skin, the way the rainbows kept a consistent blush that practically glowed. She’d named every rainbow trout in the tank Stevie Nicks, while the greenback cutthroats were all Lindsey Buckinghams. The tank, full of river water, was meant to display the health of the ecosystem, but it also served as an early warning system. If something was killing fish in the river, it killed the fish in the tank, too.
From a side lane soft with lunar mulch
and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone
on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties
as wide as an elephant’s forehead.
I sighed across the boy-mown lawn
and they shook as though they shed blessings
to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.
Who would dare pour such panties
along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.
The Milky Way was pavement
compared to their luxury. I knew
I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.
Next morning my feet felt like mallets.
I was back in the world where people
wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,
and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.
By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².
It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.
I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.
In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³
I note the absence of the word “Arab.”
Still, they do not sense us⁴.
Some of the subjects covered during Gamal’s hour of talk: the great friendship they will have; the difficulty Gamal has accepting Ib’s name—he prefers to call him Ibrahim; the movies of Kaleemt Ishtwud; the language of Arabic, which Gamal will make Ib speak like one good Arab Man, which Gamal says is the language everyone in the world knows; felucca rides on the Nile; the English language, the greatest language on earth, which Ib will teach Gamal to speak like on good English Man; this great beauty the singer Paula Abdul, but what is she a servant of (abdul means “servant of”) and how can we make her visit our house which we will build together near the Pyramids; the Pyramids, which Gamal feels one moment are the great monuments of the world we know, the next moment, garbage heaps, where bad people sell bad things that do not make Egypt look good; the right of a man to marry a woman for a few weeks, a very necessary right, men are much stronger and fairer this way, men grow beards more quickly, men walk in straight lines.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
The dining room was empty. There were dragons – dragon ashtrays, dragon statues, dragons carved into posts. In a remarkably misguided attempt at décor, there was also a profusion of mirrors. The result was upsetting.