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.

Beautiful Province (Belle Province)
A Play

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. 

Debt
Poems

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

 

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

 

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

 

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

 

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

Mary and O'Neil
A Novel in Stories

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.

The Age of Orphans
A Novel

In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.

Total Immersion
Stories

As Frankel muses on Progress in his Hillman Minx, Ed Markowitz wearily drives a rented Fiat to the Oriental Institute. He had not wanted to go on the day of his arrival, but this is the only time he can be sure to see Mujahid Rashaf, who is returning to Saudi Arabia within the week. Rashaf is an Oxford fellow and the son of a merchant prince. He will provide just the reasoned yet religious opinions that Markowitz seeks for his book, Terrorism: A Civilized Creed.

Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
Poems

In his bath my son looks half-

drowned,

lying so still,

 

his hair a scarf of weed,

his eyes closed,

and only the water breathing.

 

He practices

in his porcelain bed

his resting,

 

rehearsing

until the water takes cold

and he shivers a little against it.

Beautiful Province (Belle Province)
A Play

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. 

Debt
Poems

The Banker trails behind me with his abacus

and crowd of yes-men. I hear

the gold coins rub together in his vest.

 

The stoplights remind me. And the scars

on my ankles and the nails in my mouth.

Once my father pointed his finger at me.

 

Once my mother kissed me on the lips in winter.

I could have been a man like those men

 

on the roof, eyes narrowed at me

like diamond cutters. In surgical gowns

and crucifix tie clips, tight bands of wires

wound beneath their chests –

they remind me of me. All in sync

they cup their ears to the antenna.

 

Quiet. The Jew Levine is coming to collect

with his chisels and his sack of flesh.

Mary and O'Neil
A Novel in Stories

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.

The Age of Orphans
A Novel

In these short distances and insufferable spans the boy lives through a night forgotten by history, where the men of the land and soldiers of the shah take to each other with bullet, knife, curse and bludgeon to craft a single composition; the precise choreography of flesh puppets, strung to a thousand stars and pulled as sparring lovers, to and from the flame, to and from the gouge, to and from the stab and shot, their beating hearts like magnets charged to the opposite pulls of victory and death.

Total Immersion
Stories

As Frankel muses on Progress in his Hillman Minx, Ed Markowitz wearily drives a rented Fiat to the Oriental Institute. He had not wanted to go on the day of his arrival, but this is the only time he can be sure to see Mujahid Rashaf, who is returning to Saudi Arabia within the week. Rashaf is an Oxford fellow and the son of a merchant prince. He will provide just the reasoned yet religious opinions that Markowitz seeks for his book, Terrorism: A Civilized Creed.

Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced
Poems

In his bath my son looks half-

drowned,

lying so still,

 

his hair a scarf of weed,

his eyes closed,

and only the water breathing.

 

He practices

in his porcelain bed

his resting,

 

rehearsing

until the water takes cold

and he shivers a little against it.