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.

Shapeshift
Poems

Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.

Snake dreams uncoil,

                        burrow into the spine of books.

Night spills from cracked eggs.

Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.

We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.

The Intuitionist
A Novel

“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”

 

She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.

 

The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”

The Tender Land
A Family Love Story

As Kelly grew more confident, using longer, smoother strokes on her second leg, I became frightened that she’d hurt herself. The more adept she became at shaving, the more I held my breath against the inevitable nick, the free flow of blood from her body. Watching her, I thought about Sean’s wrists, how he had tried to slit them, how he had shown the scratches to my mother, offering them up as evidence of what he had done, as if she would not otherwise believe that he had swallowed handfuls of my father’s heart medicine. And he was right. She could not believe it. It was unbelievable. She made him show her the bottle, near empty now. Was it out of consideration that he had left a few pills for my father?

Debt
Poems

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

 

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

 

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

 

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

 

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

FEAST
Poems

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. 

Cannibal
Poems

In this wet season my gone mother

climbs back again

 

and everything here smells gutted—

bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,

 

our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling

this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared

orphans out bleating with the mongrels,

                                    all of us starved

 

for something reclaimable. What chases them,

her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,

shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.

 

I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s

neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,

her tar this same fish odor I am washing.

 

I know I am one of them. The emptied.

Shapeshift
Poems

Turn signals blink through ice in the skin.

Snake dreams uncoil,

                        burrow into the spine of books.

Night spills from cracked eggs.

Thin hands vein oars in a canyon bed.

We follow deer tracks back to the insertion of her tongue.

The Intuitionist
A Novel

“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”

 

She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.

 

The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”

The Tender Land
A Family Love Story

As Kelly grew more confident, using longer, smoother strokes on her second leg, I became frightened that she’d hurt herself. The more adept she became at shaving, the more I held my breath against the inevitable nick, the free flow of blood from her body. Watching her, I thought about Sean’s wrists, how he had tried to slit them, how he had shown the scratches to my mother, offering them up as evidence of what he had done, as if she would not otherwise believe that he had swallowed handfuls of my father’s heart medicine. And he was right. She could not believe it. It was unbelievable. She made him show her the bottle, near empty now. Was it out of consideration that he had left a few pills for my father?

Debt
Poems

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

 

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

 

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

 

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

 

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

FEAST
Poems

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. 

Cannibal
Poems

In this wet season my gone mother

climbs back again

 

and everything here smells gutted—

bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,

 

our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling

this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared

orphans out bleating with the mongrels,

                                    all of us starved

 

for something reclaimable. What chases them,

her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,

shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.

 

I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s

neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,

her tar this same fish odor I am washing.

 

I know I am one of them. The emptied.