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.
THOUGHT #3
Tyler Perry knows how to bring everything together wit all the stories? And all the singing? And all the different people talking?
THOUGHT #1
And Tyler Perry don’t never forget to bring in the spirit’ch’alities.
THOUGHT #2
‘Cause Tyler Perry loves his Mama—
THOUGHT #6
And the Lord—
THOUGHT #1
So write a nice, clean Tyler Perry-like gospel play for your parents please?
At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.
As Kelly grew more confident, using longer, smoother strokes on her second leg, I became frightened that she’d hurt herself. The more adept she became at shaving, the more I held my breath against the inevitable nick, the free flow of blood from her body. Watching her, I thought about Sean’s wrists, how he had tried to slit them, how he had shown the scratches to my mother, offering them up as evidence of what he had done, as if she would not otherwise believe that he had swallowed handfuls of my father’s heart medicine. And he was right. She could not believe it. It was unbelievable. She made him show her the bottle, near empty now. Was it out of consideration that he had left a few pills for my father?
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.
On my cheeks there are a few pimples.
For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles.
When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.
The train arrived with a smell of hot metal. Not the one she needed. Framed in the windows, the frozen-forward faces of the passengers. But they different in New York, Lucifer says. Here, the seats face forward overlooking the tracks—as if you were the conductor, you think—but there, you face the other passengers, keep yo eyes to yoself. Yes, you think, looking but not seeing, eyes turned away, curving and swerving with the tracks. The conductor shouted, STANDING PASSENGERS, PLEASE DO NOT LEAN ON THE DOORS. Cause you might fall out of the doors, like teeth spilling from a mouth. The train drew off.
THOUGHT #3
Tyler Perry knows how to bring everything together wit all the stories? And all the singing? And all the different people talking?
THOUGHT #1
And Tyler Perry don’t never forget to bring in the spirit’ch’alities.
THOUGHT #2
‘Cause Tyler Perry loves his Mama—
THOUGHT #6
And the Lord—
THOUGHT #1
So write a nice, clean Tyler Perry-like gospel play for your parents please?
At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.
As Kelly grew more confident, using longer, smoother strokes on her second leg, I became frightened that she’d hurt herself. The more adept she became at shaving, the more I held my breath against the inevitable nick, the free flow of blood from her body. Watching her, I thought about Sean’s wrists, how he had tried to slit them, how he had shown the scratches to my mother, offering them up as evidence of what he had done, as if she would not otherwise believe that he had swallowed handfuls of my father’s heart medicine. And he was right. She could not believe it. It was unbelievable. She made him show her the bottle, near empty now. Was it out of consideration that he had left a few pills for my father?
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.
On my cheeks there are a few pimples.
For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles.
When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.
The train arrived with a smell of hot metal. Not the one she needed. Framed in the windows, the frozen-forward faces of the passengers. But they different in New York, Lucifer says. Here, the seats face forward overlooking the tracks—as if you were the conductor, you think—but there, you face the other passengers, keep yo eyes to yoself. Yes, you think, looking but not seeing, eyes turned away, curving and swerving with the tracks. The conductor shouted, STANDING PASSENGERS, PLEASE DO NOT LEAN ON THE DOORS. Cause you might fall out of the doors, like teeth spilling from a mouth. The train drew off.