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.
1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.
2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.
3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.
4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.
5. Stay
6. Alive.
I plugged my poem into a manhole cover
That flamed into the first guitar,
Jarred the asphalt and tar to ash,
And made from where there once was
Ground a sound to stand on.
I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome.
In this wet season my gone mother
climbs back again
and everything here smells gutted—
bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,
our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling
this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared
orphans out bleating with the mongrels,
all of us starved
for something reclaimable. What chases them,
her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,
shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.
I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s
neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,
her tar this same fish odor I am washing.
I know I am one of them. The emptied.
You will begin to listen to the story of Josie’s life in Spanish and English. You will begin to like the way she looks. At moments you will confuse her with the stripper dancing naked on the table next to where the two of you talk. Josie will be telling you about her marriage, about her husband, about her divorce, about her daughter, about her sadness and disappointment. You will have more drinks than her.
“Recipe” from THE MAGIC OF BLOOD by Dagoberto Gilb © 1993 by the University of New Mexico Press; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc. “Recipe” originally appeared in Winners on the Pass Line (Cinco Puntos Press).
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.
1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.
2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.
3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.
4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.
5. Stay
6. Alive.
I plugged my poem into a manhole cover
That flamed into the first guitar,
Jarred the asphalt and tar to ash,
And made from where there once was
Ground a sound to stand on.
I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome.
In this wet season my gone mother
climbs back again
and everything here smells gutted—
bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,
our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling
this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared
orphans out bleating with the mongrels,
all of us starved
for something reclaimable. What chases them,
her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,
shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.
I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s
neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,
her tar this same fish odor I am washing.
I know I am one of them. The emptied.
You will begin to listen to the story of Josie’s life in Spanish and English. You will begin to like the way she looks. At moments you will confuse her with the stripper dancing naked on the table next to where the two of you talk. Josie will be telling you about her marriage, about her husband, about her divorce, about her daughter, about her sadness and disappointment. You will have more drinks than her.
“Recipe” from THE MAGIC OF BLOOD by Dagoberto Gilb © 1993 by the University of New Mexico Press; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc. “Recipe” originally appeared in Winners on the Pass Line (Cinco Puntos Press).
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.