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.
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
Kenosha is hideous behind us, cloaked by this cloud that hangs
On the pigeons flushed out: the last exhalation of the auto assembly.
We wait at the base of the docks, and talk about the White Sox,
Not the Roman Empire. My father and I stare right at it, but talk baseball.
The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.
A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.
Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.
The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
Breathing Room
There are lives twice as long as others;
they might look back on those
behind them like runners nearing
the finish line relieved
not to have been out of it so early.
We wake one day to an understanding
about our diminishment yet
by evening, we’ve turned that corner—
the present is everything; its tedium
flaring in the window’s reflection.
You get tired of being this way.
Plans go awry & other plans
get made elsewhere, somewhere
elaborately empty. Still, we believe
ourselves slightly beautiful as we check
the door then fill the bedside glass,
means of accumulation mastered,
our complaint well turned.
Unheard behind that window, the night sky—
boundless—still roars.
The man asks, Do you have a family? My thinking
brushes the air between us like a wet mark
stains white paper. My mother’s mother, dead
twenty-two years. A stone house. The ants I’ve killed.
Robyne, who, when someone hurls
toward me a small cruelty, cries. Memphis in August.
My twin brother crunching ice. All the cousins
I’ve made. Walking amongst cedar trees.
Kenosha is hideous behind us, cloaked by this cloud that hangs
On the pigeons flushed out: the last exhalation of the auto assembly.
We wait at the base of the docks, and talk about the White Sox,
Not the Roman Empire. My father and I stare right at it, but talk baseball.
The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.
A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.
Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.
The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.
When Blair protested they hit him fairly hard in the stomach, and that was the moment he knew that his life had changed. They called him la merca, the merchandise, and for the next four days he slogged through the mountains eating cold arepas and sardines and taking endless taunts about firing squads, although he did, thanks to an eighty-mile-a-week running habit, hold up better than the oil executives and mining engineers the rebels were used to bringing in.
Breathing Room
There are lives twice as long as others;
they might look back on those
behind them like runners nearing
the finish line relieved
not to have been out of it so early.
We wake one day to an understanding
about our diminishment yet
by evening, we’ve turned that corner—
the present is everything; its tedium
flaring in the window’s reflection.
You get tired of being this way.
Plans go awry & other plans
get made elsewhere, somewhere
elaborately empty. Still, we believe
ourselves slightly beautiful as we check
the door then fill the bedside glass,
means of accumulation mastered,
our complaint well turned.
Unheard behind that window, the night sky—
boundless—still roars.