The 2018 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

Jennifer Block Andrea Elliott Akash Kapur Jori Lewis Sarah Ramey Jess Row

The Whiting Foundation recognizes that works of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction are essential to our culture, but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a work of nonfiction to the highest aesthetic and intellectual level. It is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving its grantees the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.

The Recipients of the 2018

Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

Jennifer Block

Everything Below the Waist Why Healthcare Needs a Feminist Revolution Forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press Cultural reportage/women’s health

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he papaya plant has the enviable ability to grow either “male” flowers or “female” flowers or both, and it may switch sexes entirely during a heat wave, or after the fruit is harvested. Among the sola variety, native to Hawaii, a majority of plants will grow male and female flowers simultaneously, which ensures a crop will bear fruit.

Humans cannot swap petals so easily, nor can we reproduce or contracept by cellular fiat. And yet a sola papaya (smaller and rounder than the Mexican varieties) resembles a pregnant uterus, so much so that around the world, humans use the fruit to learn one method of modern reproductive control: manual vacuum aspiration, or MVA, a low-risk, low-tech method of first trimester abortion that requires little or no anesthesia.

This, too, is the fruit I have been given to practice on. I’m with a small group of learners in a living room—I have agreed not to say where or with whom—and vinyl gloves lie scattered about, a tropical smell in the air. I’ve placed my papaya on the coffee table and I’m focused on the neck, where its stem grew, which evokes the cervical os. The tool I’m using is a large plastic syringe with a bendable plastic straw-like thing, called a cannula, where the needle would be. At the top of the syringe is a bivalve, to create one-way suction.

I carefully peel the remnant of the papaya’s stem, then set the bivalve by pressing two plastic tabs, then pull the plunger on the syringe. For learning purposes, my cannula is 8 millimeters wide—larger than necessary for a very early procedure—roughly the size of a drinking straw. I press it gently into the brown dot on the fruit. The skin gives, and the instrument slides in.

The project: An investigation of how the medical system is failing women, as well as a look back at the feminist health movement that strove for better care—and what happened to it.

Judges’ citation: This is an ambitious book—refreshing and compelling—about the politics of gynecology and obstetrics, ranging across fields that include the health industry, behavioral science, and the history of sexuality. Block argues that women’s health still all too often falls into the gaps between policy, science, and politics; traces some of the often radical ways that women have attempted to repair this marginalization; and offers a critique of feminism’s unintended complicity. Research that might in other hands be wielded clumsily is marshaled to persuasive effect. Lucidly written, illuminating and even groundbreaking, this is a work of advocacy as well as a sobering history, and will be a significant contribution to the ongoing movement for improved women’s health. It may well earn a place alongside classics of feminist sociology.

Jennifer Block is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on health.

Her work has appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Pacific Standard, The Cut, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, and many other publications. Her first book, Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care, was named a “Best Book of 2007” by Kirkus Reviews and a “Best Consumer Health Book” by Library Journal.

Andrea Elliott

Invisible Child Forthcoming from Random House Cultural reportage

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asani is not one for patience. She likes being first—the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to rise each day. It is the stuff of family lore.

She was running before she could walk. Even her name speaks of a certain reach.

The bottled water came to Brooklyn’s bodegas just before Dasani was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences.

The dim chaos of Room 449 makes it hard to find her baby sister’s bottle and the shelter-issued formula. Dasani knows to read the label, to make sure it is not expired. Then the bottle must be heated. The only way to do this is to leave the room, which brings its own dangers. Crackheads roam the halls. Knife fights roil the cafeteria. Sometimes, Dasani thinks the place is haunted. Her little brother Papa is sure he has seen a ghost. The ten-story brick building was formerly a hospital, back when nurses tended to the dying in open wards. Room 449 is “where they put the crazies,” Dasani says.

She opens a heavy metal door and steps into a dark stairwell. The communal bathroom to the left recalls One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Tiled in steely green, its centerpiece is an arcane, industrial bathtub that the children routinely douse with bleach. Their feet have grown numb to the sting.

Dasani moves in a cocksure manner, the way her mother instructed. She takes the stairs to the first floor cafeteria, where more than 280 children will soon gather for breakfast. They must wait in one long line for food that comes prepackaged and unheated. Then they will stand in a second line, waiting to warm their plates in one of two fickle microwaves. The whole exercise can take an hour. But luckily, right now, the cafeteria is still empty. Dasani places the bottle in the microwave and presses the button.

The project: An examination of child poverty in 21st–century America, as told through the story of one homeless girl and her family in New York City.

Judges’ citation: Unputdownable: an essential book for our time. This shocking view of child poverty, situated in the most unequal city in the country, is a necessary project, and viewing it through the experience of the child herself raises the stakes immeasurably. The author shows a deep ethical responsiveness to her subjects.

Most commendable—and rare—is her capacity to weave a vibrant tapestry comprised equally of biographical reporting and of socioeconomic and political verities. This book deals thoughtfully with the causes of child poverty, and with the possibilities of evidence-based solutions; it will inaugurate transformative discussions of homelessness here and abroad, deepening our understanding of the effects of poverty as trauma during childhood—a vital subject for economists, social workers, politicians, therapists, and anyone interested in the American condition.

Andrea Elliott is a prize-winning investigative reporter on book leave from The New York Times. Her work has focused on marginalized people, winning a George Polk award for her 2013 series Invisible Child and the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for her series An Imam in America. She has received honorary doctorates from Occidental College and Niagara University. In 2015, Elliott was awarded Columbia University’s Medal for Excellence. She is the daughter of a Chilean immigrant mother and an American father.

Akash Kapur

Better to Have Gone Forthcoming from Scribner Cultural history/memoir

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mall-town Minnesota is safe; boundaries are well defined, behavior is prescribed (and mostly proscribed), and people don’t stray very far. And yet one day, in a wood-paneled dining room at the University of Denver, my mother hands an anti-Vietnam war flyer to a dark-skinned young man with long curly hair and a mustache, and a few year years later she will be living with that man in a thatch hut without running water or electricity, part of a dramatic project to build a new world. Was she searching for that adventure? She says she never dreamed she would end up there, but sometimes, we don’t know our own dreams, and we set our direction in life without realizing it.

It was the era, of course. My father was among the first generation to escape India, to an education and a promise of material comfort in America. He could have stayed, found a good job, maybe a life as a doctor, or lawyer, or engineer.

Success, on the world’s terms. But the world’s terms weren’t particularly interesting to him—or to any of them. My father always said, I remember him telling me when I was a boy, “You might think we were crazy, but we really believed we could change the world, we thought anything was possible.”

It was a buoyant, ebullient, churning, history-rupturing era. Are some periods more epochal than others? People always have dreams; we are always imagining alternative worlds, alternative lives. But maybe it’s easier to follow our dreams at certain times than others. Some moments offer more scaffolding for our fantasies.

A man who lives in Auroville once told me, “Auroville couldn’t have happened without the sixties. It was just such a creature of its time. We brought everything with us—all the good stuff, all the baggage. Hope, faith, love, free love, drugs, all the sloppiness, all the energy and good vibes.”

We were sitting in his house having coffee. He was telling me how he’d dropped out of college when he got a high draft number, how he’d lived for a time in Haight-Ashbury, where everything—food, rent, clothes, marijuana—was free.

Now it was the twenty-first century, decades later, and we were in Auroville: the dream, materialized. “Most of all, we were young,” he said. “We were so young and innocent, so stupid in so many ways. We were naïve; I don’t think anything could have happened without that naiveté.”

The project: An exploration of two troubling deaths in the author’s family, and of the forces of faith, ideology, idealism, and extremism at work in the utopian community where he grew up and returned to live as an adult.

Judges’ citation: A moving fusion of memoir, history, and ethnography that will inject new life into these forms. As an investigation into an unsolved mystery, it is compelling; as a meditation on the promise and the limitations of utopianism, it could have global resonance. The writing is unornamented, plangent, and affecting.

By evoking the everyday in precise detail, Kapur brings utopianism as lived practice to technicolor life. In attempting to locate the shifting border between extremism and idealism, he has written a book rooted in memory but in dialogue with the present day.

Akash Kapur is the author of India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (Riverhead); the editor of an anthology, Auroville: Dream and Reality (Penguin India); and the former columnist for the International New York Times. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and various other publications. He is also a Senior Fellow at the GovLab at NYU. He grew up in the intentional community of Auroville, India.

Jori Lewis

Slaves for Peanuts Forthcoming from The New Press History

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he name Kajoor derives from the Wolof word dior, which means soil or, to be precise, sand. Kajoor means people of the sand.

It is an area that never seemed promising to newcomers. The dry season lasts most of the year, which means that winds often comb dried-up creeks and harvested fields, whipping up sand spouts that move across the horizon like bad omens.

But those lightweight sandy soils also allow the peanut’s peg to penetrate the ground with ease and have plenty of space to develop its shell and fruit. And they allow for a worker to harvest the plant with relative ease and an intentional tug.

In short, Kajoor’s soils were ideal for peanut farming.

Kajoor was also a natural place for peanut cultivation to expand, since it sat between the poles of French colonial influence in Saint Louis and Gorée. The people of Saint Louis sent their livestock to graze in Kajoor’s golden pastures and the kingdom provisioned those coastal outposts with millet, meat, manioc, butter, and salt.

Kajoor households had been already growing peanuts in between their millet or alongside their cowpeas and watermelons, but only as a hedge against the failure of other crops. But in order to increase their production of peanuts to satisfy the increasing demand from beyond, Kajoor farmers needed to do more than plant their seeds and pray for rain. They needed young arms and strong backs that could tend to more and more fields. They had to put more acreage into farming and needed workers—willing or unwilling, friend or stranger. As the demand for peanuts increased, so did the demand for slaves.

And as the number of slaves increased, so did the number of fugitives seeking their freedom—from just 55 in 1873 to 440 in 1879, the year that Moussa Sidibé decided to run. “I was obliged to serve an excessively harsh master,” Sidibé later wrote, “who made every effort to make my life bitter.”

The project: The captivating story of how peanut agriculture supported the rise and fall of slavery in nineteenth-century West Africa, and of the fugitive slaves who took back their freedom.

Judges’ citation: This project holds great promise as an investigation not only of African slavery’s past and ongoing entanglements with what we eat and how it is grown, but how this particular form of slavery supported industrialization in the West.

Lewis’s work fuses powerful storytelling and authoritative historical research, and she is adept at framing local events against a global backdrop. Vivid individual stories braid seamlessly with a more general discussion of economic history in prose that is lively and absorbing, though exact. A highly original work of history and ethnography, Slaves for Peanuts will be a formidable addition to the historical literature and yield a detailed and enlightened story of what it has meant to raise crops on this planet.

Jori Lewis is an independent American journalist based in Dakar, Senegal, where she reports on the environment and agriculture. She has reported for numerous publications and media outlets, including PRI’s The World, Discover Magazine, Nova Next, and Aeon. She was a fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs, where she wrote about food systems and agriculture in West Africa, and a contributing reporter to the series Early Signs: Reports from a Warming Planet, which won a George Polk Award.

Sarah Ramey

The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness Forthcoming from Doubleday Cultural reportage/memoir

I

returned to college under a heavy and invisible blanket of illness. I carried my portable IV antibiotics with me in a cooler, and my roommates sat with me in rocking chairs while I shot liquid antibiotics into my arm.

I rolled between classes and bed and back to classes like a wet log, waking with a start to find I had been dead asleep, face first on my desk in a class called The Amazing Brain.

Now my health was a trickster, a shape-shifter, a shroud, a mist.

Now my symptoms were vague and diffuse, tapping me on the shoulder only to dematerialize every time I turned around.

I’m not anti-therapy or anti‑antidepressant—I have adored certain therapists and know many people who have been helped by antidepressants.

And I’m not saying I wasn’t emotional or at times very sad. Of course I was. I had a hideous disease. But the notion that antidepressants should be the only course of medical treatment available to me—the idea that my sadness would drive me to misperceive or make up something so... elaborate (not to mention humiliating) (not to mention rectal) as a cry for help—well, this was quite a shock.

Mostly, it just didn’t stand to reason. Even if no one believed me about the aching and the itching and the pelvic pain, which, I get it, you can’t see on a scan or under the microscope, there was still hard evidence of something wrong. The fevers. The soccer-ball stomach. The labia. The furry tongue.

It didn’t matter.

In the end, I caved and even my parents—both doctors—got on board. With my consent, my father was the one to write me my first prescription for Paxil.

The project: A memoir with a mission: to help the millions of (mostly) women who suffer from unnamed or misunderstood conditions, including autoimmune illnesses, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, chronic Lyme disease, and more.

Judges’ citation: Unabashedly a book with a purpose, The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness debunks corrosive myths of female hypochondria—but what makes this project crackle is its dexterity of imagination and distinctive voice, its punchy, rhythmic, robust prose. It is impossible to pigeonhole such work: this is a capacious, ludic memoir and also an acutely mordant commentary on society’s inability to see illness in plain sight. Ramey has done her homework, some of it unwillingly; drawing on her own vast medical files and navigating their obliquities is a crucial part of her project. Once finished, her book will be pressed into service among communities of readers who’ve seen their physical suffering chalked up to mental states—with a prescription for the latter swiftly following. It will spark a literary discussion about the role wit, play, and irreverence can have in narratives of sickness and recovery.

Sarah Ramey is a writer and musician (known as Wolf Larsen) living in Washington, DC. She graduated from Bowdoin College in 2003, received an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia in 2007, and worked on President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Jess Row

White Flights: Race, Fiction,and the American Imagination Forthcoming from Graywolf Press Cultural reportage/criticism

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he fictions I write about here represent an era when most white writers, like white Americans in general, consciously or unconsciously retreated from the “subject” of race, while writers of color did not; the result is that it often seems like there are two American literatures: one in which race in always marked, and almost always tied to the identity of the author, one in which race seems to play no part at all. I don’t think this is actually the case: because stories not only deny but un-deny, tell but un-tell themselves. Kierkegaard wrote that life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward; this may or may not be true of life, but it’s unquestionably true of stories. “Understanding backward” is what allows us to stop and see the gaps, the internal silences, the ironic substitutions and double entendres, that make narratives so interesting and frustrating and continuously alive. It’s a kind of ebb and flow that often reveals alternative, even opposed, meanings, or significations, or gestures, in the same text. You can call that ebb and flow deconstruction, or dialogism, or dialectics, or whatever; my point, in this case, is that reading with a different kind of alertness, with eyes truly open, reveals that even writers who would seem to have almost nothing to say about race (Anne Tyler, for example) are saying a great deal.

The project: A novelist’s exploration of how race unfolds in the American psyche—in novels, films, music, political discourse, and public space—combining wideranging criticism with an exploration of his own experiences of whiteness.

Judges’ citation: Gutsy, capable, urgent, innovative, and timely: these elegant essays think and write across lines of race in American literature. The perception of whiteness in this country is charged and complex, and the author’s project is to address these complexities and further the critical conversation. The essays move the ball down the field, mixing personal humility with a deep and resourceful reading of critical race theory, literature, and American history. Row examines strenuous naiveté, white flights of fancy, and unreconciled and avoidant imagination, and suggests an intriguing concept of reparative writing. The breadth and erudition of this project are convincing. Fully realized, this will be a soul-searching treatise on the way race underpins our stories in life and on the page.

Jess Row is the author of the novel Your Face in Mine and two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Granta, and Tin House, as well as three editions of The Best American Short Stories; he’s received a Whiting Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta in 2007. His essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Bookforum, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at the College of New Jersey and has been an ordained dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen for fifteen years.

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