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.
Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.
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.
In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
so mama said no running, afraid
for me: shriveled lansones, sickly.
threat of skinned shins. cherry
glow of lola’s clove cigarettes,
smoke plumes sealing my throat.
or on my cheeks, plum rashes
blooming from playing in witchwillow.
these days, I don’t run much.
but I was only seven when I broke
a girl’s front teeth.
You would like to go home. These drug runs are getting tiring. Besides, Mississippi makes you nervous. You look past your sun-darkened elbow out the window of the van at the house Rusty has sent you to. It is low, thick-looking, and made of red brick. Looks like a kiln. Stiff yuccas sprout from the bristling yard, and a dead palm tree bends against the right corner of the house. Timmy leans his sweaty face from the back, over your shoulder. “Rusty sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t he?” he says, breathing hotly on your ear.
Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.
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.
In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
so mama said no running, afraid
for me: shriveled lansones, sickly.
threat of skinned shins. cherry
glow of lola’s clove cigarettes,
smoke plumes sealing my throat.
or on my cheeks, plum rashes
blooming from playing in witchwillow.
these days, I don’t run much.
but I was only seven when I broke
a girl’s front teeth.
You would like to go home. These drug runs are getting tiring. Besides, Mississippi makes you nervous. You look past your sun-darkened elbow out the window of the van at the house Rusty has sent you to. It is low, thick-looking, and made of red brick. Looks like a kiln. Stiff yuccas sprout from the bristling yard, and a dead palm tree bends against the right corner of the house. Timmy leans his sweaty face from the back, over your shoulder. “Rusty sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t he?” he says, breathing hotly on your ear.