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.
CHOTON
I’m just saying like taxonomically, does it even make sense to categorize my genitalia and your genitalia as the same thing, like…
He indicates RAHEEM’s penis.
…if that’s a penis then…
He pulls his boxers down to show his own penis.
I mean what is this? It’s a polyp.
RAHEEM
Okay.
CHOTON
It’s a little nunu.
RAHEEM
Well I like your little nunu…
RAHEEM examines CHOTON’s penis. He pulls back his foreskin just a bit. CHOTON winces.
CHOTON
Ow. Careful.
RAHEEM
What?
CHOTON
No it’s— it’s just sensitive.
The street deserted. Nobody,
only you and one last
dirt colored robin,
fastened to its branch
against the wind. It seems
you have arrived
late, the city unfamiliar,
the address lost.
And you made such a serious effort –
pondered the obstacles deeply,
tried to be your own critic.
Yet no one came to listen.
Maybe they came, and then left.
After you traveled so far,
just to be there.
It was a failure, that is what they will say.
I like a crusty bread. Last spring, when the man who sold my son the satellite dish told him that the signal wasn’t coming in good because of the big old elm tree across the road by the house, that it was getting in the way of the reception, everyone—my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandsons, and then, because everyone else was, even the man—looked at me. I loved that tree. It was always there. It would always make me feel good to walk in the yard through its patterned shadow on my way into the house. But then, across the road, there was the satellite dish. I said they could chop the tree down but I wanted every bit of wood from it cut and stacked in a pile by itself. And though I hadn’t done it for years, since we’d got an electric stove and a furnace, I started back using the old wood stove, which we’d left in the kitchen mostly for looks. It’s better to cook bread in a wood stove anyway. You can tell the difference not just in the crust but also in taste.
Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.
One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”
Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day
is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,
panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,
ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red
hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it
before him like judgment, saying to the mist,
then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what
I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.
CHOTON
I’m just saying like taxonomically, does it even make sense to categorize my genitalia and your genitalia as the same thing, like…
He indicates RAHEEM’s penis.
…if that’s a penis then…
He pulls his boxers down to show his own penis.
I mean what is this? It’s a polyp.
RAHEEM
Okay.
CHOTON
It’s a little nunu.
RAHEEM
Well I like your little nunu…
RAHEEM examines CHOTON’s penis. He pulls back his foreskin just a bit. CHOTON winces.
CHOTON
Ow. Careful.
RAHEEM
What?
CHOTON
No it’s— it’s just sensitive.
The street deserted. Nobody,
only you and one last
dirt colored robin,
fastened to its branch
against the wind. It seems
you have arrived
late, the city unfamiliar,
the address lost.
And you made such a serious effort –
pondered the obstacles deeply,
tried to be your own critic.
Yet no one came to listen.
Maybe they came, and then left.
After you traveled so far,
just to be there.
It was a failure, that is what they will say.
I like a crusty bread. Last spring, when the man who sold my son the satellite dish told him that the signal wasn’t coming in good because of the big old elm tree across the road by the house, that it was getting in the way of the reception, everyone—my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandsons, and then, because everyone else was, even the man—looked at me. I loved that tree. It was always there. It would always make me feel good to walk in the yard through its patterned shadow on my way into the house. But then, across the road, there was the satellite dish. I said they could chop the tree down but I wanted every bit of wood from it cut and stacked in a pile by itself. And though I hadn’t done it for years, since we’d got an electric stove and a furnace, I started back using the old wood stove, which we’d left in the kitchen mostly for looks. It’s better to cook bread in a wood stove anyway. You can tell the difference not just in the crust but also in taste.
Rather than a photo, Mona kept a list of her mother’s phobias in her wallet. She was afraid of the usual stuff—death, beatings, rape, Satan—but these commonplace fears were complemented by generalized anxiety over robbers, Russians, mirrors, beards, blood, ruin, vomiting, being alone, and new ideas. She was also afraid of fear, the technical term for which was phobophobia, a word Mona liked to repeat to herself, like a hip-hop lyric. Whenever Mona longed for her, or felt like paying her a visit, she glanced at that list, and then thought of all the pills and what happened to her mother when she took too many, and the feeling usually passed.
One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”
Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day
is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,
panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,
ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red
hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it
before him like judgment, saying to the mist,
then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what
I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.