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.

The New Yorker (June 16 and 23, 2003)

The last visitor left.

You closed the door and smiled at me.

I watched you cross Room 515 through

the flowers in vases, and your face

looked just like your face, smiling

down at me in my stupid green issue gown.

I felt myself want you

through the plastic tubes, 

the vines around, across and above me.

I felt myself want you

exclusively. Even pain faded

into the scenery as you leaned in

to kiss me. And I met your kiss

with my lips and we were both

folded into it,

into that clean clean folding,

that soft longed-for kiss

across the side rails. That particular kiss

in its delicious oblivion hoisted us

above the suffering body.

We felt that long transfer of soft

for softness, that kiss lifting us

above the basement drawers

where we would finally face up.

The Art of Cartography
Stories

At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”

The Floating World
A Novel

My grandmother owned a valise in which she carried all her possessions, but the stories she told were also possessions. The stories were fantastic, yet I believed them. She said that when she was young fireflies had invaded her town, so the whole town was lighted even during the nighttime. She said she had been told that the summer she was born, strange clouds passed through the sky. Every night for seven nights, a different cloud. The clouds all had a strange glow, as if someone had taken the moon and stretched it into a cloud shape. Those seven moon-clouds, she said, had been a lucky omen. As she spoke, she always gestured a great deal, so the background to her stories would be the soft tinkling of the bell we had bought her.

Parasites Like Us
A Novel

The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.

Worldling
Poems

I found a white stone on the beach

inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.

All night I’d slept in fits and starts,

my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.

And then morning. And then a walk,

the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.

I felt its calm power as I held it

and wished a wish I cannot tell.

It fit in my hand like a hand gently

holding my hand through a sleepless night.

A stone so like, so unlike,

all the others it could only be mine.

 

The worldess white stone of my life!

The Line Becomes a River

To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of crushing and proximate cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, El Paso’s twin city of Juárez was perpetually being presented as a place of murder and violence, a landscape of factories, maquiladoras, drug cartels, narcos, hit men, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, slaughter, massacre, shootings, gun fights, turf wars, mass graves, garbage dumps, impunity, corruption, decay, erosion, a hemispheric laboratory of social and economic horror. This representation—the narrative of a city irreparably fractured by its looming border, saddled with broken institutions and a terrorized populace—had become part and parcel of its legacy, the subconscious inheritance of all those who came into the city’s orbit.

 

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.

The New Yorker (June 16 and 23, 2003)

The last visitor left.

You closed the door and smiled at me.

I watched you cross Room 515 through

the flowers in vases, and your face

looked just like your face, smiling

down at me in my stupid green issue gown.

I felt myself want you

through the plastic tubes, 

the vines around, across and above me.

I felt myself want you

exclusively. Even pain faded

into the scenery as you leaned in

to kiss me. And I met your kiss

with my lips and we were both

folded into it,

into that clean clean folding,

that soft longed-for kiss

across the side rails. That particular kiss

in its delicious oblivion hoisted us

above the suffering body.

We felt that long transfer of soft

for softness, that kiss lifting us

above the basement drawers

where we would finally face up.

The Art of Cartography
Stories

At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”

The Floating World
A Novel

My grandmother owned a valise in which she carried all her possessions, but the stories she told were also possessions. The stories were fantastic, yet I believed them. She said that when she was young fireflies had invaded her town, so the whole town was lighted even during the nighttime. She said she had been told that the summer she was born, strange clouds passed through the sky. Every night for seven nights, a different cloud. The clouds all had a strange glow, as if someone had taken the moon and stretched it into a cloud shape. Those seven moon-clouds, she said, had been a lucky omen. As she spoke, she always gestured a great deal, so the background to her stories would be the soft tinkling of the bell we had bought her.

Parasites Like Us
A Novel

The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.

Worldling
Poems

I found a white stone on the beach

inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.

All night I’d slept in fits and starts,

my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.

And then morning. And then a walk,

the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.

I felt its calm power as I held it

and wished a wish I cannot tell.

It fit in my hand like a hand gently

holding my hand through a sleepless night.

A stone so like, so unlike,

all the others it could only be mine.

 

The worldess white stone of my life!

The Line Becomes a River

To live in the city of El Paso in those days was to hover at the edge of crushing and proximate cruelty, to safely fill the lungs with air steeped in horror. In news, in academic texts, in literature and art, El Paso’s twin city of Juárez was perpetually being presented as a place of murder and violence, a landscape of factories, maquiladoras, drug cartels, narcos, hit men, sicarios, delinquents, military, police, poverty, femicide, rape, kidnapping, disappearance, homicide, slaughter, massacre, shootings, gun fights, turf wars, mass graves, garbage dumps, impunity, corruption, decay, erosion, a hemispheric laboratory of social and economic horror. This representation—the narrative of a city irreparably fractured by its looming border, saddled with broken institutions and a terrorized populace—had become part and parcel of its legacy, the subconscious inheritance of all those who came into the city’s orbit.

 

From THE LINE BECOMES A RIVER by Francisco Cantu, to be published on February 6, 2018 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2018 by Francisco Cantu.