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.
Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,
brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot
where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,
and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –
the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,
a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.
You know it too! … The charm of funerals in the rain,
the special effects men with their hoses well aimed,
huge drops exploding on
classically beautiful
black umbrellas.
You know them, -
the houses like fat vegetables
stuffed with old lace, ceramics, silverware, dust –
secure as bank vaults.
Who will inherit?
Vittorio is dining with
that Chinese actress again…
Will the kingdom be divided?
Who will keep
the chandeliers in good repair
and tend the lists of public enemies?
By the end of the day, Ji-ho had moved things around, managing, even, to reposition an oak dresser by himself, whereas our mother and I, for all the years we would occupy the middle room, would never take down my cousin’s Star Wars poster, his Carnegie Mellon pennant. Every now and then, she and I would start up the same old argument about who slept on the floor and who slept on the twin bed. Each of us trying to urge comfort on the other. Neither of us knowing how to commit an act of selfishness.
Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale sliver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.
Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.
After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.
Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,
brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot
where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,
and harsher truths hit home hour after hour –
the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,
a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.
You know it too! … The charm of funerals in the rain,
the special effects men with their hoses well aimed,
huge drops exploding on
classically beautiful
black umbrellas.
You know them, -
the houses like fat vegetables
stuffed with old lace, ceramics, silverware, dust –
secure as bank vaults.
Who will inherit?
Vittorio is dining with
that Chinese actress again…
Will the kingdom be divided?
Who will keep
the chandeliers in good repair
and tend the lists of public enemies?
By the end of the day, Ji-ho had moved things around, managing, even, to reposition an oak dresser by himself, whereas our mother and I, for all the years we would occupy the middle room, would never take down my cousin’s Star Wars poster, his Carnegie Mellon pennant. Every now and then, she and I would start up the same old argument about who slept on the floor and who slept on the twin bed. Each of us trying to urge comfort on the other. Neither of us knowing how to commit an act of selfishness.
Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale sliver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.
Gary was a big boy, ugly and pale, with a nose like a peeled potato. I’m not just saying that because my ex-wife slept with him once. We all slept around. She slept with Larry, too, but I don’t have anything bad to say about Larry. I myself almost slept with Larry, he was irresistible, a beautiful man. Gary and Larry—these names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not mine: I am guilty.
After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.