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.

Fear, Some
Poems

I feel I could eat women.

 

Driving alone, I’m hungry,

hawking bus stops and sidewalks.

 

Eyeballs grinding, I harden.

 

My mind, a bulging ice box.

My computer, a deep freeze.

 

The bingeing grows out of hand –

 

my wastebasket coughing up

the napkins hiding the bones.

Borderland Apocrypha
Poems

To remain     ::        is to grieve
                        ::        is to answer
                        ::        what side of the río
                                  we crown
                        ::        or
                        ::        where your ancestors
                                  Coffin
 

Thief in the Interior
Poems

Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for

my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.

She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers

what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.

We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.

The Last Days of Old Beijing
Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

Book Mansion was overwhelming. China’s largest bookstore occupied 172,000 square feet and carried 230,000 titles. Bestsellers included Chinese titles such as I Was an American Police Officer; I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years; Chinese-Style Divorce; and Harvard Girl, a memoir that revealed the parenting style that made her stand out from her Chinese classmates and gain acceptance to the school. That book was in its sixty-third printing.

 

Downstairs, Monica’s Story lay between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies. A boxed set about Göring rubbed shoulders with What’s Behind Jewish Excellence? Translated American titles ranged from the predictable – The Da Vinci Code, The Atkins Diet—to the surprising—Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van, and a Woody Allen collection whose Chinese title promised MENSA Whores. An entire floor held English-learning materials. Love English taught pickup lines and pillow talk, including cultural hints such as “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’”

Fictions from the Self
Poems

I do not know how I need the air,

or if it needs me. The lost air,

the air which is smashed, like a red hat.

When the sun rises the amnesty

of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,

the maroon horses - when the sun rises

the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard

with a thumb on top.

Combing the Snakes from His Hair
Poems

Bristling outward

his sadism roots him deepest.

Some will hurt whomever they choose.

 

God-headed and radiant

            but shimmering little to offer.

Don’t build your bed of crisis

            or lie on the down of his ire.

Fear, Some
Poems

I feel I could eat women.

 

Driving alone, I’m hungry,

hawking bus stops and sidewalks.

 

Eyeballs grinding, I harden.

 

My mind, a bulging ice box.

My computer, a deep freeze.

 

The bingeing grows out of hand –

 

my wastebasket coughing up

the napkins hiding the bones.

Borderland Apocrypha
Poems

To remain     ::        is to grieve
                        ::        is to answer
                        ::        what side of the río
                                  we crown
                        ::        or
                        ::        where your ancestors
                                  Coffin
 

Thief in the Interior
Poems

Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for

my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.

She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers

what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.

We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.

The Last Days of Old Beijing
Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

Book Mansion was overwhelming. China’s largest bookstore occupied 172,000 square feet and carried 230,000 titles. Bestsellers included Chinese titles such as I Was an American Police Officer; I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years; Chinese-Style Divorce; and Harvard Girl, a memoir that revealed the parenting style that made her stand out from her Chinese classmates and gain acceptance to the school. That book was in its sixty-third printing.

 

Downstairs, Monica’s Story lay between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies. A boxed set about Göring rubbed shoulders with What’s Behind Jewish Excellence? Translated American titles ranged from the predictable – The Da Vinci Code, The Atkins Diet—to the surprising—Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van, and a Woody Allen collection whose Chinese title promised MENSA Whores. An entire floor held English-learning materials. Love English taught pickup lines and pillow talk, including cultural hints such as “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’”

Fictions from the Self
Poems

I do not know how I need the air,

or if it needs me. The lost air,

the air which is smashed, like a red hat.

When the sun rises the amnesty

of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,

the maroon horses - when the sun rises

the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard

with a thumb on top.

Combing the Snakes from His Hair
Poems

Bristling outward

his sadism roots him deepest.

Some will hurt whomever they choose.

 

God-headed and radiant

            but shimmering little to offer.

Don’t build your bed of crisis

            or lie on the down of his ire.