Whiting Award Winners

The Globe's summer reading list features Whiting Award winners Victor LaValle, Sarah Ruhl, and Alexander Chee, as well as Creative Nonfiction Grant Kristen Radtke.

Whiting Award winner Ladan Osman directed "The Ascendants," in which four young Black women musicians from Chicago talk about how music has shaped them. It's now available to stream on Amazon Prime.

For The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Albert Samaha reviews the essay collection by Barrett Swanson, writing that Swanson "serves as a candid and empathetic narrator, guiding us with restrained cynicism and enticing prose."

For The Los Angeles Review of Books, Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Joshua Roebke reviews the new book by Alex Wellerstein, reflecting "Only a certain kind of person, both foolish and resolute, would choose to study a subject so extensive, yet so restrictive, as the secrets of nuclear weapons."

Seek You by Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Kristen Radtke is one of Vulture's top picks for summer 2021 reads. "Radtke is unsentimental yet sincere," reviewer Cornelia Channing writes, "citing research on the impact of social isolation on life expectancy (it’s not good) and offering as salient a description of loneliness as I’ve read."

Whiting Award winner Tope Folarin contributes to Vulture's list of recommended reading, reviewing a new title by Emilio Fraia and the collection It’s Life As I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980.

New Sinews features four "The Hour of the Rat" poems by Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Brandon Shimoda. "I showed her the night before, the moon./ It was full. same as the moon of my homesickness," he writes.

Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Brandon Shimoda has three new drawings from the series "A Giant Asleep in Fortune’s Spindle" featured in Visible Binary. 

For The Oxford American, Villareal writes about her father, an undiscovered guitar prodigy in the borderlands. "What I experienced as poetry came first through the song my father wrote for me when I was two years old," she reflects.

For The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Kristen Radtke writes about why we need to listen to our loneliness as writers and human beings.
 

Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Kristen Radtke takes on what it means to age as a woman in isolation, for Vox.

Jericho Brown talks about how HIV, race and rape can coexist with joy, lust and love. "Poetry," he says, "is always waiting for its moment."

Check out a preview of part three of Whiting Award winner Victor LaValle's "Eve," a comic book set in a future where the environmental crisis has come to a head. Preteen Eve -- and her android teddy bear -- are out on a journey to save her father (and the world).

"We build hells together, you and I—how do we move forward out of their fires? By walking through them until we wake up, as McCrae, like any dreamer, knows." Whiting Award winner Dana Levin writes about "The Hell Poem" by fellow winner Shane McCrae, for The Rumpus.

Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Kristen Radtke interviews Alison Bechdel about her athletic gear, creating a "container for the self," and the extreme difficulty of drawing trees, in The Believer.

"The Western Glacier stonefly may not be quite as renowned as the polar bear, but it’s just as dependent on ice." Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient Ben Goldfarb writes about the importance of rock glaciers for the National Parks Conservation Association.

Check out a recording of Literary Magazine Prize winners' Words Without Borders and Foglifter's event celebrating queer writing around the world, featuring a dynamic, multilignual lineup with writers and translators from India, Taiwan, Panama and more.

For The New York Times, Whiting Award winner Kaitlyn Greenidge discusses the traditions Black communities have historically used to celebrate emancipation from slavery. "The agency that comes from deciding your own traditions — a cold water toast, a watch night — become lost to a corporate calendar," she argues.

Whiting Award winner Ilya Kaminsky's latest poem appears in The Atlantic and begins with a birdcall of sorts: "Come on/ skylark/ you door-to-door salesman overselling a song."

Brown discusses the experience of winning a Pulitzer Prize in the midst of the pandemic, why being a poet necessitates the ability to ask hard questions, and how Black churches ignited his childhood interest in poetry.

The magazine calls Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu "[an] astonishingly moving and incredibly timely memoir" and "a nuanced portrait of globalisation from the inside in a fractured world in crisis."

Phillips talks to the Society for American Baseball podcast about his screenplay for Legendary’s biopic on baseball icon Roberto Clemente.

The award honors "an enduring, substantial literary career." The East Oregonian, announcing the award, wrote of Gloss's work, "The arc in Molly’s works [...] takes us away from that damaging mythology into the reality of the American West."

For Taint Taint Taint Magazine, Peter Trachenberg writes about reading Katherine Ann Porter's short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider, set during the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, during the Covid-19 pandemic.