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.

Officer Friendly and Other Stories

“Now, because it’s his birthday and he wasn’t supposed to make it this far, he asked that we throw him a bash, like the old Augusta blowouts, and he asked that at midnight we shoot him dead.”

 

I stared at him. He didn’t waver.

 

“We figure you’re the best guy to do it,” he said, slapping a hand on my shoulder.

 

“I’ve never even shot a gun,” I said.

 

He pulled up my shirt and took the gun from the back of my pants. “It’s pretty basic. Point and pull. You’ve seen the movies.” He aimed the pistol at the portrait of the old man, said “Bang” and faked the recoil, then blew imaginary smoke from the barrel.

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

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.

The Museum of Unnatural Histories: Poems

 

 

River Hymns

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.

Maximum City
Bombay Lost and Found

The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.

Officer Friendly and Other Stories

“Now, because it’s his birthday and he wasn’t supposed to make it this far, he asked that we throw him a bash, like the old Augusta blowouts, and he asked that at midnight we shoot him dead.”

 

I stared at him. He didn’t waver.

 

“We figure you’re the best guy to do it,” he said, slapping a hand on my shoulder.

 

“I’ve never even shot a gun,” I said.

 

He pulled up my shirt and took the gun from the back of my pants. “It’s pretty basic. Point and pull. You’ve seen the movies.” He aimed the pistol at the portrait of the old man, said “Bang” and faked the recoil, then blew imaginary smoke from the barrel.

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

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.

The Museum of Unnatural Histories: Poems

 

 

River Hymns

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.

Maximum City
Bombay Lost and Found

The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.