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.

Song
Poems

                My mother

gathers gladiolas. The gladness

is fractured. As when

the globe with its thousand mirrors

cracked the light. How

it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives

and the show of light

they shot around us: so that

down the dark hall the ghosts danced

with us: down the dark hall

the broken angels.

WHEREAS
Poems

I don't trust nobody

 

             but the land I said

 

I don't mean

 

present company

 

of course

 

you understand the grasses

 

hear me too always

 

present the grasses

 

confident grasses polite

 

command to shhhhh

 

shhh listen

Fictions from the Self
Poems

I do not know how I need the air,

or if it needs me. The lost air,

the air which is smashed, like a red hat.

When the sun rises the amnesty

of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,

the maroon horses - when the sun rises

the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard

with a thumb on top.

Stone Crop
Poems

The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,

a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,

where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,

and their names recall great chiefs

and tribes and the empowering animals.

 

Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –

you must say these names out loud. You must

strip the radios in which the myths survive.

Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing

the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps

on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.

Edisto
A Novel

The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess.

Arresting God in Kathmandu
Stories

He climbed over the fence surrounding the Queen’s Pond, took off his clothes, and dived in, not caring whether a police squad would approach. The chill of water invigorated him as he waded through the lilies floating on top. He wondered how long it would take, if he allowed himself to sink, for the water to fill his lungs. He thought of monsters with long tentacles that supposedly lived at the bottom, and he imagined them tearing into his flesh. Would his wife be able to recognize the body?

Song
Poems

                My mother

gathers gladiolas. The gladness

is fractured. As when

the globe with its thousand mirrors

cracked the light. How

it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives

and the show of light

they shot around us: so that

down the dark hall the ghosts danced

with us: down the dark hall

the broken angels.

WHEREAS
Poems

I don't trust nobody

 

             but the land I said

 

I don't mean

 

present company

 

of course

 

you understand the grasses

 

hear me too always

 

present the grasses

 

confident grasses polite

 

command to shhhhh

 

shhh listen

Fictions from the Self
Poems

I do not know how I need the air,

or if it needs me. The lost air,

the air which is smashed, like a red hat.

When the sun rises the amnesty

of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,

the maroon horses - when the sun rises

the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard

with a thumb on top.

Stone Crop
Poems

The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,

a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,

where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,

and their names recall great chiefs

and tribes and the empowering animals.

 

Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –

you must say these names out loud. You must

strip the radios in which the myths survive.

Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing

the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps

on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.

Edisto
A Novel

The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess.

Arresting God in Kathmandu
Stories

He climbed over the fence surrounding the Queen’s Pond, took off his clothes, and dived in, not caring whether a police squad would approach. The chill of water invigorated him as he waded through the lilies floating on top. He wondered how long it would take, if he allowed himself to sink, for the water to fill his lungs. He thought of monsters with long tentacles that supposedly lived at the bottom, and he imagined them tearing into his flesh. Would his wife be able to recognize the body?