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 cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.
We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.
He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.
That I commune with the dead as I oil your feet. My house at the throat of the river, the door to this world, I wait for you. That I ask of the spirit and receive the knowledges: yerbabuena, vela de virgen, baño de alhucema. Cut the joint at the hoof & fatten the soup. Accept this offering, thank the plant. That I love you with the knowledge of our ways lost to violence. That you will call me up from the silt in your bones.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.
thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.
hyphy dancehall — no can
hear tings demur.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer
whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.
ain’t neck breaking like dutty
when she whine.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.
thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?
Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged
with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered
for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,
cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love
the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.
Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles
to the inferred shoreline.
The bowhead whale lives for centuries and could potentially grow forever. Researchers say their spines don’t set, so even at two hundred years of age they might still grow. Yesterday, through a dear friend, a complete stranger gifted me a whale vertebra that might be from the eternally possible spine of a bowhead whale.
What a heavy piece of oracle. Yes. Honor the bowhead whale whose large proportion of body fat keeps them warm enough in the Arctic to outlive the various weapons used to kill them over time. I have said it before, I will say it again, fat is a winning strategy. New research suggests that young bowhead whales may even take nutrients from their bones, to further grow their baleen (the food filters in their mouths) in order to be able to eat more krill, grow more fat, live more better. Evolutionary geniuses.
My own backbone has been teaching me something too. My pediatricians diagnosed me with scoliosis as a school-aged child, and we may never know if I was born this gorgeously crooked or if the early weight of heavy books caused a shift in how I would carry myself through this life. What we do know? The books certainly were heavy and I haven’t yet put them down. And also I walk, sit, and move in the world in a way that overstretches part of me, compresses the other side.
The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.
We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.
He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.
That I commune with the dead as I oil your feet. My house at the throat of the river, the door to this world, I wait for you. That I ask of the spirit and receive the knowledges: yerbabuena, vela de virgen, baño de alhucema. Cut the joint at the hoof & fatten the soup. Accept this offering, thank the plant. That I love you with the knowledge of our ways lost to violence. That you will call me up from the silt in your bones.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.
thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride.
hyphy dancehall — no can
hear tings demur.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofer
whine mih curvature: cause a road slaughtah.
ain’t neck breaking like dutty
when she whine.
titanium, boom shocka, kill di woofa.
thrash reverberating neatly polish mih ride. sih?
Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged
with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered
for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,
cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love
the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.
Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles
to the inferred shoreline.
The bowhead whale lives for centuries and could potentially grow forever. Researchers say their spines don’t set, so even at two hundred years of age they might still grow. Yesterday, through a dear friend, a complete stranger gifted me a whale vertebra that might be from the eternally possible spine of a bowhead whale.
What a heavy piece of oracle. Yes. Honor the bowhead whale whose large proportion of body fat keeps them warm enough in the Arctic to outlive the various weapons used to kill them over time. I have said it before, I will say it again, fat is a winning strategy. New research suggests that young bowhead whales may even take nutrients from their bones, to further grow their baleen (the food filters in their mouths) in order to be able to eat more krill, grow more fat, live more better. Evolutionary geniuses.
My own backbone has been teaching me something too. My pediatricians diagnosed me with scoliosis as a school-aged child, and we may never know if I was born this gorgeously crooked or if the early weight of heavy books caused a shift in how I would carry myself through this life. What we do know? The books certainly were heavy and I haven’t yet put them down. And also I walk, sit, and move in the world in a way that overstretches part of me, compresses the other side.