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.
Two marriages:
Clara and Fritz Haber: Clara finishes a doctorate in chemistry. She is the only woman at her school. She is brilliant but reserved. The first time Fritz proposes, she declines. The second time, she agrees. After they marry, he demands that Clara be a housewife and a mother, while he travels for work. When war breaks out in 1918, he proves his patriotism through the development of a new weapon, something invisible to the human eye and absolutely silent. After finding out about the chlorine gas, Clara shoots herself in the family garden.
Marie and Pierre Curie: Pierre makes several marriage proposals to Marie before she accepts. A commonality then between these women. On her wedding day, she wears a dark blue dress. More practical, she thinks, and afterward, in her dress, goes back to the laboratory with Pierre. The lab is the basement of their home. In three years, they discover polonium and radium. In eight, they are awarded a Nobel. At first the committee will not recognize her (no woman has won before) but Pierre demands it—she is the one who sifted through ten tons of mineral-rich ore to find that tenth of a gram.
This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.
I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.
My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.
Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.
She love rainin on parades.
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
MR. GREEN: Two verbs! Granted, they are irregular. But that’s no excuse, for these forms —
Do. Not. Change.
They are immutable!
More reliable than the people in your lives. More stable than governments. More dependable than churches or philosophies. These verbs are your deliverance!
Commit these patterns to memory. Determine the person, the number, the tense. Then remember the form. That’s all there is. To conjugation.
Conjugation. Such a beautiful word. Such a beautiful act.
At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.
My family’s experience isn’t fodder
for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs
But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?
Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game
Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil
Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company
and I am descended from a long line of wildfires
I mean tribal leaders
The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off
I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?
Two marriages:
Clara and Fritz Haber: Clara finishes a doctorate in chemistry. She is the only woman at her school. She is brilliant but reserved. The first time Fritz proposes, she declines. The second time, she agrees. After they marry, he demands that Clara be a housewife and a mother, while he travels for work. When war breaks out in 1918, he proves his patriotism through the development of a new weapon, something invisible to the human eye and absolutely silent. After finding out about the chlorine gas, Clara shoots herself in the family garden.
Marie and Pierre Curie: Pierre makes several marriage proposals to Marie before she accepts. A commonality then between these women. On her wedding day, she wears a dark blue dress. More practical, she thinks, and afterward, in her dress, goes back to the laboratory with Pierre. The lab is the basement of their home. In three years, they discover polonium and radium. In eight, they are awarded a Nobel. At first the committee will not recognize her (no woman has won before) but Pierre demands it—she is the one who sifted through ten tons of mineral-rich ore to find that tenth of a gram.
This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.
I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.
My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.
Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.
She love rainin on parades.
I live brokenly and assemble together
Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip
Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,
Its brux. From the lip of a wooden
Bowl carved from the knot of a limb
Drifted, my name was given on water
And laid down like hail upon my tongue.
It’s become a bewilderment of white –
It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.
MR. GREEN: Two verbs! Granted, they are irregular. But that’s no excuse, for these forms —
Do. Not. Change.
They are immutable!
More reliable than the people in your lives. More stable than governments. More dependable than churches or philosophies. These verbs are your deliverance!
Commit these patterns to memory. Determine the person, the number, the tense. Then remember the form. That’s all there is. To conjugation.
Conjugation. Such a beautiful word. Such a beautiful act.
At the end of the hall, through the partially opened waiting-room door, she saw the hemline of a black dress, the gray of once-white tennis shoes, and a green hijab that, rather than covering the long black hair, held the broken arm of a young woman who was made of bird bones and calcium deficiency, who believed this to be her twenty-second broken bone, when in fact it was merely her twenty-first.
My family’s experience isn’t fodder
for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs
But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?
Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game
Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil
Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company
and I am descended from a long line of wildfires
I mean tribal leaders
The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off
I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?