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.
“He says, why should some people live like kings and the rest like rats? And why should the wealthy, enamored with Europe and the West, dictate how the whole country should dress, talk, live? What if we like our chadors and our Koran? What if we want our own mullahs to rule us, not that saint – what’s his name?” She taps her fingers on the dashboard, trying to remember the name. “ Morteza told me he is worshipped in Europe… I know! Saint Laurent, or something like that…”
“Yves Saint Laurent?” Farnaz laughs. “He’s not a saint, Habibeh. He’s a designer. That’s just his name.”
The hotel staff placed a pitcher of water on each table next to a small stack of translucent cups. I couldn’t help but shake my head at that. We would have been better off, I figured, taking Imam Saleem’s suggestion and just staying put at the Temple. The kitchen sisters would have at least given us some fruit punch and sugar cookies. Hell, had we asked nice enough, they might have made us some fried chicken and potato salad. If we were trying to throw money around like Rockefellers, why not put it in the building fund or pay zakat? But I was a one-man HVAC operation, with little more than a truck, some tools, and a house I was just three mortgage payments away from owning outright. As far as those brothers were concerned, I was too ordinary, based on outward appearances, to be an example.
A bobwhite sounds through larks
and jays, the wringing-wet shade,
as in the first world, before Adam
understood their sharp iambs,
when the refrain could’ve been
anything’s: plant or animal, or light
so pure it sang. Even now
how absolute, how wondrously
primitive the singularity rings –
shouting its name, its name,
its name… till from elsewhere
an echo swells through April-thick wings
as if addressing some question
on the presence of parallels.
In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons. They closed over the sky like an eyelid.
Cole claimed to remember the good times between my parents. But I didn’t. Seemed like they were always breaking up to make up. After their big fights, they usually got back together with a little ritual: Al Green, a bottle of red wine, and a carton of Chinese noodles. Sometimes they would read aloud to each other from one of their favorite writers, Camus or Richard Wright. Other times they would just stand in the living room, lights off, swaying to the soul music, kissing, and whispering to each other secrets Cole and I would never know.
Come the marrow-hours when he couldn’t sleep,
the boy river-brinked and chorded.
Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided.
Sieved our alluvial sounds—
“He says, why should some people live like kings and the rest like rats? And why should the wealthy, enamored with Europe and the West, dictate how the whole country should dress, talk, live? What if we like our chadors and our Koran? What if we want our own mullahs to rule us, not that saint – what’s his name?” She taps her fingers on the dashboard, trying to remember the name. “ Morteza told me he is worshipped in Europe… I know! Saint Laurent, or something like that…”
“Yves Saint Laurent?” Farnaz laughs. “He’s not a saint, Habibeh. He’s a designer. That’s just his name.”
The hotel staff placed a pitcher of water on each table next to a small stack of translucent cups. I couldn’t help but shake my head at that. We would have been better off, I figured, taking Imam Saleem’s suggestion and just staying put at the Temple. The kitchen sisters would have at least given us some fruit punch and sugar cookies. Hell, had we asked nice enough, they might have made us some fried chicken and potato salad. If we were trying to throw money around like Rockefellers, why not put it in the building fund or pay zakat? But I was a one-man HVAC operation, with little more than a truck, some tools, and a house I was just three mortgage payments away from owning outright. As far as those brothers were concerned, I was too ordinary, based on outward appearances, to be an example.
A bobwhite sounds through larks
and jays, the wringing-wet shade,
as in the first world, before Adam
understood their sharp iambs,
when the refrain could’ve been
anything’s: plant or animal, or light
so pure it sang. Even now
how absolute, how wondrously
primitive the singularity rings –
shouting its name, its name,
its name… till from elsewhere
an echo swells through April-thick wings
as if addressing some question
on the presence of parallels.
In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons. They closed over the sky like an eyelid.
Cole claimed to remember the good times between my parents. But I didn’t. Seemed like they were always breaking up to make up. After their big fights, they usually got back together with a little ritual: Al Green, a bottle of red wine, and a carton of Chinese noodles. Sometimes they would read aloud to each other from one of their favorite writers, Camus or Richard Wright. Other times they would just stand in the living room, lights off, swaying to the soul music, kissing, and whispering to each other secrets Cole and I would never know.
Come the marrow-hours when he couldn’t sleep,
the boy river-brinked and chorded.
Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided.
Sieved our alluvial sounds—