Liza Birkenmeier DRAMA
Elwin Cotman FICTION
Emil Ferris FICTION
Samuel Kó . láwo . lé FICTION
Claire Luchette FICTION
Karisma Price POETRY
Aisha Sabatini Sloan NONFICTION
Shubha Sunder FICTION
Sofi Thanhauser NONFICTION
Annie Wenstrup POETRY
INTRODUCTION BY Howard Norman
Shubha
WHITING FOUNDATION TRUSTEES
Peter Pennoyer, President
John N. Irwin III, Treasurer
Amanda Foreman
Kumar Mahadeva
Jacob Collins
Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary
TRUSTEES EMERITI
Antonia M. Grumbach
Robert M. Pennoyer
Kate Douglas Torrey
The Whiting Foundation provides support for writers and scholars who astonish us by expanding the boundaries of art and understanding. Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.
The Foundation invites nominators from across the country whose work brings them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent to propose a single candidate each. The pool of nominators changes annually, and has included writers, professors, editors, agents, critics, booksellers, artistic directors of theaters, dramaturges, and directors of literary festivals. Winners are chosen by a selection committee composed of a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors appointed every year by the Foundation. By tradition, nominators and selectors serve anonymously to allow them complete freedom in choosing the strongest candidates. Whiting winners have gone on to receive numerous prestigious fellowships and other awards, and their work has shaped and advanced literature in this country over the past four decades.
The Foundation’s other programs in support of literature include the Creative Nonfiction Grant to enable the completion of deeply researched works in progress written for a general audience, and the Literary Magazine Prize, which celebrates outstanding publications that nurture new writers. All the programs are intended to empower fresh thought and help bring it to the audiences who need it most.
Howard Norman
I want to write as intimately as possible. In 1985 I was among the first recipients of a Whiting Foundation Writing Award. At the time, I was mainly writing articles about birds and experimenting with the idea of epistolary nonfiction, and for the latter my model was Edward Lear, whose letters to patrons contain some of the most vivid natural history reportage imaginable. Anyway, on the most practical level, the award immediately translated into Time; time to complete a first novel, The Northern Lights. But it was the encouragement that meant the world; the Whiting Foundation’s was one panel in a triptych of encouragement that also included William Merwin’s, who had commented on an early draft, and my wife Jane Shore’s, whose own writing life as a poet already had such accomplishment, dignity, and poise.
From the get-go, it seemed important to almost understate such a formative moment so as not to risk self-hagiography or risk the elevation of perhaps a once in a lifetime piece of good fortune to a prescient level of regard. Because the truth was, considering my decidedly meager literary output, the confidence placed in me by the Whiting Foundation far outreached any I had in myself, and so naturally I hoped through the years to live up to it. Then there was the gift of an entirely unforeseen coterie, my fellow recipients; these included Wright Morris, James Schuyler, and August Wilson, which meant, at least on paper, being in the company of iconic figures.
On the evening of the award ceremony, I was seated behind the poet James Schuyler. At one point, in rumpled sports jacket and trousers, and with a tone that contained as much admonition as offhanded sage wisdom, he turned and said, “Look at me, at my age, getting a prize like this, and all that rent money. Well, all any of us can do is stay the course.” Every day I try to work my way up to melancholy; then, the question is, how to put that melancholy to good use? Writing books. As Akutagawa Ryūnosuke put it, “What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy.” Now, at age seventy-five, I suppose that is all I have really
done, for better or worse, simply stayed the course—through joys, sorrows, loss of friends, the insistences of quotidian bewilderments, illness and many failed manuscripts, things such as we all experience.
I feel this is a period of unprecedented rich diversity in worldwide forms of narrative expression, fictional, nonfictional, and a vast array of uncategorizable literature. (I mean, just look at the Whiting Award recipients of 2025. What fearless and eclectic gifts they have.) Of course, I am not capable of saying this with the intuitive authority of James Schuyler, but at least I can simply quote him, “All any of us can do is stay the course.” That sentence had gravitas and practical meaning for me in 1985; tenfold as much in 2025.
On the phone Maui-Vermont about five months before he died, William Merwin, after mentioning how his near total blindness had inspired him to have the poems of Borges read to him, said, “Have you written a book in which, more than any other, you recognize your actual true nature?” I made him laugh by asking, “Is that some sort of secret Buddhist question?” He said, “Maybe it is. But have you?”
In a moment I said, yes, just one, though. I told him what it was. “I ask,” he said, “because lately I’ve been thinking about that question as it applies to my own work.” He specifically mentioned a poem titled “Yesterday,” which appeared in his 1983 collection Opening the Hand. It begins: My friend says I was not a good son / you understand / I say yes I understand. It is a poem that is painfully revealing but not sanctimoniously confessional. I mentioned this conversation because sometimes, in the course of a writing life, one accesses the most deeply informing, even if heretofore the most expertly camouflaged, aspects of one’s own temperament. I said, “Do you wish you’d have written something like that earlier in your life?” Merwin replied, “I don’t have that kind of regret. But I can say, that whenever it happens, be grateful for it.”
HOWARD NORMAN received the Lannan Prize in literature. For thirty-three years, he taught in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. He is the author of nine novels, four memoirs, books for children, and a graphic detective series. His most recent novel is Come To The Window , and his most recent memoir is The Wound Is The Place The Light Enters. He is presently editing his letters sent to W.S. Merwin from Japan, Rain Enters My Diary. He received a Whiting Award in Fiction in 1985.
ASHER – When did you know you were a lesbian?
WINN – Oh my god.
ASHER – What is that a stupid question?
WINN – I never “knew I was a lesbian.”
ASHER – Bisexual or whatever.
WINN – No I. I don’t know. I knew some things from the time I was incredibly young.
ASHER – What did you think?
WINN – I don’t like it when you ask me about my sexuality like it’s. I hate it when you act like it’s mysterious to you.
ASHER – I respect . . . anything you want. I’m not—I—
ASHER – You tell me anything you like at any time.
WINN – I hate explaining myself to you.
WINN – And I don’t know how. Ever since I was incredibly young, I was so worried that I was going to express something wrong, or bad. So I practiced crushing my devotion . . . is maybe a way to say it? I got very good at that? And then I got this idea that I was a fundamentally unemotional person, and I still think, I always think that everyone else is being hysterical when they express any feeling—
WINN - But. What could be—I guess—what could be—sometimes—what could be better?
ASHER – Well then. I think you want me to tell my wife.
WINN – Why do you say that?
ASHER – I think that’s an expression.
WINN – Okay.
ASHER – Of feelings.
WINN – Did you always want to be famous?
ASHER – Nope.
WINN – I listened to your music.
ASHER – All right.
ASHER – That’s it?
WINN – I liked it.
ASHER – Good.
WINN – I know that one song.
ASHER – Yeah that’s the. That’s the song.
WINN – When did you write that?
ASHER – / I didn’t.
WINN – The one about how only god knows about . . . roads?
ASHER – Yeah that’s the one. I didn’t write it.
WINN – Who wrote it?
ASHER – Don’t know.
WINN – Because Lord only knows where the road’s . . . gonna go.
ASHER – It was an old line-dance song.
WINN – Ah because I did think, like: what about maps?
ASHER – Yeah it’s an old line-dance song. We just made it newer.
WINN – I used to love that song, actually.
ASHER – Used to?
WINN – You want to sing it to me?
ASHER – I’ll sing to you.
WINN - You will?
ASHER – Any time you want, yeah. Anything you want.
WINN – I don’t make you nervous?
ASHER – Nope.
WINN – Wait really I don’t make you nervous?
ASHER – Nope.
ASHER – Do you want to?
WINN – Yeah.
ASHER – Mm. Well—I—you don’t make me nervous sitting right there but I have had a feeling.
WINN – Of fear?
ASHER – Mm-hm. A sort of feeling of fear when you’re on your way. When you’re coming over. I always have a minute or so where I think: maybe you won’t get here.
LIZA BIRKENMEIER is the author of Dr. Ride’s American Beach House , which premiered at Ars Nova (Finalist for Lambda Literary Award in Drama) and Grief Hotel , which premiered at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks and was remounted by Clubbed Thumb and New Georges at The Public Theater (Obie Award with director Tara Ahmadinejad). She devised Islander with director Katie Brook and wrote the book for Jill Sobule’s musical F*ck7thGrade (Wild Project). She was the Tow Playwright-in-Residence at Ars Nova and a member of EWG at The Public Theater. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow.
Then came planting season. On our walk to school we passed felled palmettos. We went to class. At recess I hung around the boys in hopes they’d pick me for their ball games.
One day word spread that a terrible thing happened to Amos Barnes. We gathered in a small group at the edge of the yard, around the log where Amos sat, spindly and gape-mouthed, hair cropped and curly. Afraid to talk at first, he gave in after we all screamed at him, perhaps none louder than myself.
What happened was, on the way back from school, Amos, feeling grown, called out “Howdy, Edna” to Miss Edna on her porch. Addressing any grown-up like that, let alone a woman of Miss Edna’s stature, was an execution-worthy offense. Naturally she set for the Barnes cabin to tell Amos’s mom, her words a bullet in the chamber soon as Mr. Barnes came home. First Amos’s daddy “punched the freckles” off him (Amos’s words). Then he sent the boy for a switch. But whenever Amos tried pulling the branch off a cherry tree or chinaberry, a breeze whisked the limb out of reach. So he returned home and, according to Amos, who lacked the imagination for guile, the pecan in their yard gave his daddy instructions, in a voice Mr. Barnes at first took for his beloved grandmother. It forced him to the ground, like what happened to Pa.
“I can still feel the switch,” Amos murmured. “It was like getting hit with pure hate.”
“From the pecan?” asked Jesse quietly. For a second, his eyes met mine.
“Nah.” Subsequently he described following his daddy over the bridge, where the tree waited for them, and every word out his mouth put strain on my bladder. Of all things the hurricane felled, that devil survived. Indeed, I wondered if it could die, or if we’d stumbled upon a creature as immortal as demons who torment sinners eternally.
After Amos’s story, his words lingered like acrid smoke. Jesse sat in the grass with his knees to his chest. He knew better than to share what we knew, but he was thinking about the whuppin’. Pure hate. Then, from the crowd, someone chuckled.
“It’s weird you’re all scared of a tree,” declared Carrie Mae Sawyer.
She’d been sitting to my left: a chubby, blond, sunburnt mulatto who excelled at granting wishes. For example, our teacher Miss Sandra took joy from Carrie Mae’s hand shooting up like a dandelion all day. The church ladies celebrated their successful efforts to imbue the youth with Pentecostal values when Carrie Mae offered to do charity. That I knew her blue polka-dot dress and penny loafers hid a mendacious nature made me feel like the keeper of a maddening secret.
“You calling him a fibber?” I challenged, trying to look mean and at the same time hold my piss.
Pink like bubblegum, her lips veered sideways when she smiled, a saucy expression borrowed from her mother. “You mean a liar?”
“Ooh, I’m telling! She said lie. I’m tell—”
“Shut up!” Jesse cut me off harshly. “You ain’t telling nobody.”
We weren’t supposed to say shut up either, but I got the point. It was hard to keep secretive with Carrie Mae spouting bad words. In any case, she went on, “Amos would never fib. He says it’s real, it’s real.”
“Then I hope the tree get you!” I said.
Artificial innocence quivered her gray eyes. “But doesn’t your daddy work at a sawmill? He cuts trees all day. If he’s not afraid, I shan’t be afraid.”
If only I was Jackie Robinson. Then I could take a Louisville Slugger and knock that round, white head right off her shoulders. Unable to stop the pressure any longer, I dashed into the brush, looking for all the world like I was fleeing Carrie Mae, to unbutton my overalls, squat, and wet the mud for what felt like forever.
From “The Switchin’ Tree”
ELWIN COTMAN is the author of four collections of speculative short stories— The Jack Daniels Sessions EP , Hard Times Blues , Dance on Saturday , and Weird Black Girls —and the poetry collection The Wizard’s Homecoming . His debut novel, The Age of Ignorance , will be published by Scribner. Cotman’s work has appeared in Grist , Electric Lit, Buzzfeed , The Southwestern Review , and The Offing , among others. He holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Mills College. He lives in Oakland, California.
From My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One
EMIL FERRIS was born in Chicago and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book One (2017). Emil is the winner of the Lambda Literary Award, the Lynd Ward Prize, the Ignatz, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the recipient of four Eisner Awards, including the 2018 award for Best Writer/Artist, as well as France’s 2019 Fauve d’or Award in Angoulême. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two was published by Fantagraphics in 2024. Emil’s forthcoming titles include Records of the Damned , a prequel to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters , and A. Rosenbloom and the Marionette Murders . Emil received the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 2024.
When Morufu offered to take Able God somewhere to smoke, he had not pictured this kind of setting. He had assumed they’d go smoke a joint on some corner or in an empty classroom. Now he felt like turning back. He was not the kind of person who’d hang around a place like that. There was no way he would put those substances into his body.
The boys moved to the next phase of their alchemy. They mixed cocktails of crushed tramadol tablets, codeine cough syrup, and CocaCola in water bottles. Three of them gathered the crushed ingredients and rolled up fat joints. The joints gave off a sickly smell, like burning refuse. Able God covered his nose in disgust.
“I have to get ready for work very soon,” Able God lied to Morufu, who was chatting with a boy leaning against the fence. The boy wore a filthy singlet and had red, sunken eyes. His body was as slim as the trunk of a sapling.
“What?” Morufu asked.
“I have to go. I have work.”
Morufu protested. “No, man! Drink and smoke, then you can go. Abi, you got no liver?” Then raising his voice for everyone to hear, he continued, “This friend of mine wants to leave because he wants to go to work.” Morufu broke into a laugh. Some of the boys laughed with him. The one wearing the filthy singlet passed Able God a joint.
“It won’t smell so bad when the drug starts working magic in your body.”
Able God steeled himself and brought the joint to his mouth. He exhaled quickly, trying to push his contrary thoughts away. His eyes began to burn. He squeezed them shut and quickly took several drags to get past the horrible tang of the smoke and feel the effects of the drug. Suddenly, he felt a tremendous, incomprehensible warmth rising in his body.
Some of the boys had started squeezing out tubes of glue into an empty plastic bag and were huffing the fumes. Those who smoked did so with their faces turned toward the hot, sunny sky, swatting flies away with their free hands until impish smiles came to their lips and
a twinkle to their eyes. One whistled a tune through the gap in his discolored, brownish teeth. Another sniffed the air around him like a dog. They were all suffused with an almost mystical joy. The air was thick with it. They set up dice and card games, placing their bets. The takes were mostly rubber bands because they did not have any money
They drank from the Ragolis bottles as they smoked. When someone passed a bottle to Able God, he allowed the contents to rush past his lips. The viscous fluid coursed down his throat, some dribbling onto his chin, his sharp-pointed Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
They started chatting. Their voices came loud and slow. Soon, Able God felt laughter rising within him. He laughed, and the sound of his voice returned to him like an echo. He took another swig from the Ragolis bottle. Music rose in his head—a song, a rhythm. As he danced, his gaze fell on Morufu, who was also dancing, tapping his fingers above his head. His movements were jerky as he waltzed slowly through time. Able God held his gaze a little longer. He felt no fear, only stillness and wonder.
Time passed. A group of the boys slumped back against the grimy wall, taking long pauses between talking. Some of them dozed off with their backs to the wall. The man with the filthy singlet curled up close to the wall, muttering to himself. As Able God looked on, an idea filtered through his muddled thoughts.
SAMUEL KỌ LÁWỌLÉ was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the author of the novel The Road to the Salt Sea , a finalist for the International Book Awards and longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. His work has been published in several prestigious literary journals, and he was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, and the UK’s First Novel Prize. He studied at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa; is a graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and earned his PhD in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University. He teaches fiction writing full time as an Assistant Professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He also recently joined the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers as a faculty member.
It is a pleasant thing, to be read to, even when you aren’t really listening. Father Steve’s homily was about many things: adolescence, IranContra, a man who purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of Healthy Choice pudding, taxes, white flight, something called a skipjack, and Adam and Eve. The AC was cranked high, and huge industrial fans were blasting so loud, his voice got lost on its way from the pulpit.
Horse was nodding off. I gave her a nudge, and she blinked and sat upright. Father Steve liked to strum a guitar while he sang hymns—he hated the organ, called it “stodgy,” felt it had no place in modern worship—and each song was like a lullaby.
Pete was the first to find a feather: one floated down and landed on his knee. Another appeared, and they kept coming one by one, then all at once. At the altar, Father Steve was busy transubstantiating, too lost in the task to notice until everyone in the pews was already smiling about it: the church had filled with fine white feathers. The fans sent them high, like snow in reverse. We watched the tiniest of them drift down, and just when we reached and tried to grab them, they’d catch the breeze and rise back up. They hovered and spun mid-flight, turned up and over themselves, drifted and dipped in faltering arcs.
Someone sneezed, then sneezed again.
“Oh, wow,” Father Steve said into the microphone, when he looked out from the pulpit, chalice in his hand. The whole spectacle was marvelous, and absurd; I was helpless with wonder.
Horse said, “Oh my God, look.”
We turned to see what she was pointing at: Lawnmower Jill was standing in the back of the church, beaming. She held a baby in one arm, and she’d split the sleeve of her coat open so the baby could reach into the nylon and pull out the down inside and toss handfuls of feathers into the air. She kept tearing open new sections of her coat and giving the baby more feathers to send into the air. The baby was giggling, flinging her head back so she could see all the tiny bits of plumage levitate. I smiled to see it.
“What in the Sam Hill,” Frances whispered.
“She’s acting like a child,” Therese said, and she stepped over everyone’s feet on her way out of the pew. She started down the aisle, feathers clinging to her as she went. The baby’s mother got there first and held out her hands for Lawnmower Jill to give her the baby. When she didn’t, the woman yanked the baby from Lawnmower Jill’s hands. Then Therese took Lawnmower Jill by the elbow and led her up the aisle to sit in our pew.
“Okay, people,” Father Steve said. “Kill the fans.”
Someone switched them off, and the feathers dropped slowly onto our heads. We lined up for Communion in a daze. I knew, waiting in line, that I was supposed to be solemnly reflecting on the significance of the Eucharist, but I was still giddy with delight, busy picking feathers from the folds of my habit when Father Steve held a wafer in front of my face and said, “Body of Christ.” I needed a second to remember to say, “Amen.”
CLAIRE LUCHETTE is the author of Agatha of Little Neon and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Their work has appeared in Best American Short Stories , VQR , Ploughshares , The New York Times , The Iowa Review , and others. Claire is a 2024–25 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and was the 2022–23 Rona Jaffe Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. They’ve received grants and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, MacDowell, Yaddo, and others. They studied at Brown University and the MFA program at the University of Oregon and teach creative writing at Binghamton University. Their second novel, Swans , is forthcoming from FSG.
As happiness, As the wailing tambourine that replaced my uncle’s gun, As the dancing it does when he waves it at the man who cut him off, As the rattle of pills in my father’s hands to slow the multiplying cells, As me thinking something can be holy, As a pig, As a poem that doesn’t mention the word father or water or drowned, As a lie as red as a crow’s mouth, As a streetlight whose bulb never breaks, As a mother who has a child who’s allowed to be nothing more than their age, As weeknight curfew, As reparations, As a new car, As a down payment, As the bay leaf inside the pot of red beans boiling on Mardi Gras day, As a Zulu coconut, As something so dark you have no other option but to call it precious, As a sibling, As a rotten tooth, As an aunt who has warmed the leftovers of our family before sundown, As whatever’s left of my skeleton after the family pet has sucked the sorrow from every bit of my marrow.
“I’m Always So Serious”
I was spoiled by lavish thoughts, I admit it. History almost unchained itself from my weaker clavicle. Everyone looked so excited on the anniversary of assassination. I wrote this because I want to live
in the house I cannot own because I am not white. Forgive me. I’ve said this before but I was in a different state, a softer mania, and this time, a wife lunged towards the mouths of overwatered magnolias. They were already dead.
At my home, two chickens peck the yard and refuse to leave us eggs.
I refuse to rest out of unmet want. I mean, I harass the gnats in the bathroom.
I fix the Sprite, wash your back, watch the night, eat all the dead crab.
You watch me accumulate in particulars. I stretch the curtains. This is daylight: the swelling of a lizard’s red throat. Inside the home I want for the wrong reason, there is a lamp that won’t work. I know because the owners keep their blinds open.
The husband joins his wife near the olive shaded lamp and quails as his raving lover seizes the neck of the fixture. I shudder in the passenger seat of this city, far enough to not be heard but a light shines bright and I am seen, sleuthing and serious. I know close violences still form in the absence of want.
I keep walking as the husband shuts the blinds.
A native New Orleanian, KARISMA PRICE is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023) which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Pick. Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Series , and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review . She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.
In Remarks on Colour, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “There is no such thing as luminous gray.” This seems like the best way to explain the paintings of Richard Diebenkorn: even the gray glows. My mother’s best friend, Juliette, scents the house with a pot of nutmeg, spearmint, clove, and cinnamon on the stove, and collects amethyst. I think of her every time I hear wind chimes. She has skin so pale it seems to be edged by blue. When she first saw Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, Juliette says, she “fell in.”
In the video from my fifth birthday, you can hear Juliette’s vaguely aristocratic voice cracking off-color jokes to make my dad laugh while he is filming. That was the day our dance teacher instructed us to throw a parachute into the air like a low-lying cloud, whispering as we clustered underneath the red shadow. Somewhere in that footage, Juliette’s son Ramin is wandering around in a Big Bird costume, gracious amid the children and the chicken wings. For years after Ramin’s death, he sat inside a cheap plastic frame near my mother’s desk, his raised denim collar and movie-star good looks radiating a kind of angelic cool.
The left side of one of Diebenkorn’s paintings moves through phases of blue: underlit by gray, then white.
“I just listened to a program about elephant songs,” I tell Juliette on the phone. I describe the acoustic biologist who could feel “a throbbing in the air” near the elephant cages. A sound “below the frequency of what humans can hear.” Juliette responds by talking about Mayan ruins, time travel, and the idea that Mozart could probably hear music in the air, that he could “bring that in from the ether.”
Joan Didion discusses on the radio the way her writing style has shifted over time. Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt tells her, of Blue Nights, “There was an instruction process. Or like the recitation of a poem that you’ve come to know. You don’t maybe understand the poem, but you know the rhythms that are involved here, and you complete them for yourself.” She responds, “That’s perfect.”
SILVERBLATT: That’s what poetry does.
DIDION: Yeah.
SILVERBLATT: And that is, I think, what you’ve wanted your prose to do from almost the beginning.
DIDION: I did. I mean, consciously, even. But I didn’t know how to get there. Gradually I’ve learned how to get there.
SILVERBLATT: What a price.
DIDION: Yeah.
After Joan Didion says “yeah,” the interview ends. Blue Nights is a memoir about the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo. This is what Silverbatt means when he speaks of “a price.”
AISHA SABATINI SLOAN is the author of The Fluency of Light , Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit , Borealis , and Captioning the Archives. She is the winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award, the 1913 Open Prose Contest, the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, the Jean Córdova prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her essays can be found in Callaloo , Autostraddle, Guernica , The Paris Review , The New York Times , Gulf Coast , and The Yale Review, among other places. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.
On the crowded bus to Somerville, I was aware of how strong the parcel in my lap smelled. Coffee, curry leaves, tamarind—the frowns and twitching noses of my fellow passengers made me push the bag under my seat. On Highland Avenue, I got off at Walnut Street and walked downhill toward Union Square. The October wind from the valley below was colder than I’d anticipated; by the time I reached Gita’s house, I was shivering.
They’re predicting frost tonight, Gita said by way of greeting. She shut the door behind us, and at once I was enveloped by warmth and rich cooking smells. I handed her the parcel, given to me six weeks earlier in Bangalore by her mother. I hope everything is still fresh, I said, and she dismissed my concern with a flick of her hand. Past deliveries—half a dozen at least—of powders, preserves, and mixes were still sitting unopened in her freezer. She’d been trying for years to persuade her mother that there was no need to send anything, but the more she insisted, the more determined her mother seemed to maintain the flow of provisions. I should start warning our relatives and friends, Gita said as she led me into the kitchen: I should say, If you’re planning a trip to America, you’ll be on her hit list, so please make up some excuse—too much luggage already, no time—or she’ll act like you run a courier service. Doesn’t matter if you’re headed to California or even Canada— she’ll ask you to mail me the stuff.
That the traffic was now almost exclusively one way made these deliveries especially frustrating. Even ten years ago she used to get requests from back home to send jeans, gadgets, chocolates. Now she’d stopped asking what she could send or bring because the answer was always, We get everything here now. There was a certain glee in the way they said it, too, as if what her family really wanted to express was, America is not so great anymore; you no longer have things we want. It prompted in her something of a backlash: she’d taken to telling her mother she needed absolutely nothing, she was perfectly capable of roasting and grinding her own spices, thank you very much. But her mother would laugh and say, When I’m there, I see you pack a granola
bar for lunch. Where do you have the time to cook?
She’s bitter, Gita said, pulling the cork from a bottle of wine. We were standing by the stove, where a large, oblong Dutch oven exhaled steam from around the rim of its lid. I’m not surprised Amma feels such resentment. Married off at age nineteen, forbidden by her in-laws to continue her studies, and to now be watching her only daughter settled abroad, happily unmarried at forty-five, a tenured professor, financially independent—it would drive any woman in her sixties crazy, seeing what she might have been allowed to do had she been born twenty years later or simply said to my grandparents, Fuck off, I have my own plans. She chose not to be a renegade, and now all she can do is make these wild declarations of how America has turned me into a moneyearning work machine; without her sending me puliyogare gojju and kootu podi, my diet will be nothing but granola bars, and I’ll die a premature death from diabetes.
SHUBHA SUNDER ’s debut short story collection, Boomtown Girl , set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award and was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Award and the New American Press Fiction Prize. Her debut novel, Optional Practical Training , was published in March 2025 by Graywolf Press. Sunder’s stories and essays have appeared in places like Catapult , The Common , New Letters , Crazyhorse , and Narrative Magazine and received notable mentions in Best American Short Stories . She is a 2020 recipient of the City of Boston Artist Fellowship Award and a 2016 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
It may not be intuitive to everyone who does not sew that clothes are made by people, not just machines. In fact, it was not until I started making clothes myself—I was nine years old and I wanted to replicate the cream-colored blouse that Jennifer Connelly’s character wears in The Labyrinth—that I really understood clothes are made. This probably sounds absurd. I remember watching a young man who had grown up in Manhattan learn that if you planted an apple seed, an apple tree could grow. These things can happen in a culture as divorced from agriculture and industry as the one in which we live today. Once I started sewing, clothes revealed themselves as assemblages of tubes and planar surfaces: two-dimensional cloth arrayed on three-dimensional bodies, pierced with holes, spangled with buttons, folded and tucked to make pleats, rounded under at the edges to make hems. Making clothes demanded that I examine the way the tube of the arm connects to the tube of the torso, and the full range of motion of the shoulder joint. I realized that a neck opening had to be large enough to allow the hard cantaloupe of the head to pass through it, and then fastened up with buttons if the shirt was to be snug around the neck. I came to understand clothes as a very particular kind of sculpture, made to echo the body’s shape but also to transform that shape: a puffy shoulder to make the arm billow out like a bird’s, a flared leg to make the shape of the human calf into an ecstatic bell. Experiments with sewing taught me to appreciate clothes, and the art and labor that goes into them.
I learned to appreciate cloth when I tried to make clothing without it.
I was a polemical teenager. One day shortly before New Year’s Eve 2002, I announced that the human race had been tragically closedminded regarding the material for clothing, insisting, as they had since the beginning of time, that it be made of cloth, when there were clearly many other suitable materials readily available. I proposed that this year for New Year’s Eve my friends and I wear dresses made only of paper.
We gathered at Lila’s house, down a long dirt road by the Tisbury Great Pond, where her family’s sheep grazed in pasture running
up to the water. My family had kept sheep, too, before we moved to Massachusetts from rural Vermont in 1995. My friends and I started in the late morning, and spread out a massive pile of newspapers, magazines, and packing material. Hannah used only the covers of Vogue and clear plastic tape and let her boyfriend Colin adjust the hemline with a pair of scissors, which he did until you could almost see her ass. Luke made himself a handsome newspaper suit. Lila made herself a pleated skirt out of Stop & Shop glossy inserts, and for the top of the ensemble she used the cardboard rainbow spinner wheel removed from a Candy Land board game, placed right over her solar plexus, with bands of white printer paper radiating out over her shoulders and around her narrow chest. Kate made a series of concentric paper hoops held together by a strip down the front. I made a newspaper dress and earrings out of toilet paper rolls. We all crimped our hair.
At the party, our dresses revealed a design flaw. They ripped. It started as we exited the car, and continued as we danced, walked, sat, or even lifted our arms to take swigs of our forties. By the time we went home, we were all more or less naked.
SOFI THANHAUSER is a writer, artist, and musician based in Brooklyn. She is the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (Pantheon, 2022) and has received fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, Ucross, and Millay Arts, among others. Her work has appeared in Vox , The Guardian , Observer Magazine, Dame , and Literary Hub , among others. Her second book, Shelter , is forthcoming from Riverhead.
“Gugguyni Transcribes the Archives as Persephone”
I ate and the fireweed blazed. Roadside blooms snared roadkill while asphalt caught leaves, the way calloused hands snag silk. Tennination dust capped mountains, concealed rocks, troubled aspens. I ate and the wind gave birch branches breath. With borrowed reanimation, their trunks slivered from silver jackets and they bowed to my ear. They named their future selves: veiled and violet-toothed polypore. Shaggy scaly cap. Funeral bell. The highbush cranberries flamed their leaves in agreement. Still, I ate, bitter flesh broken by stretched shadows. Now, not enough sweetness tethers this world, my empty hand, estranged mouth, stained with longing.
Stardate 2373: The Captain suspects time is no longer linear, that she, and the ship, are caught in a recursive timeline. From a different starship, Chakotay watches time unfold, he presses a button, it folds again.
“Ghost Pixels”
I’ve archived beauty all my life. News anchors introduce blue women and blue girls into my home. Their faces imprint on my eyes. Their ghosts float through my mind. The anchor’s voice echoes in my sleep. It cries missing, scandal, dead.
No corpses are displayed on screen. Dead girls and women are not art. Life observes the living. Still, death echoes
behind blue smiles. Girls become women, transfix their bodies into moths. They float, open and shut their wings, their faces.
The TV screens broadcast their faces. They smile and wave even in death. Their bodies move like buoys floating across sets. A story, never their lives, breaks like waves. Anchors place women on ticker-tape shoulders that echo
the news. The newscaster’s voice echoes missing, scandal, dead as screens shuffle faces. How beautiful, how lovely the women are. If missing, I hope they’re not dead. When they die, we dissect their lives into made-for-TV docu-dramas like bodies
preserved in formaldehyde. Blonde hair floats on screen. Pale, blue-eyed women echo here. Some say it’s an aesthetic choice in life to choose who echoes and who to efface. Sometimes I envy the beautifully seen dead women—I a green woman among blue women.
It’s not that I want to live as a blue woman. I would not spend my life floating behind a screen. I do not wish for death.
It’s only I’ve never heard an echo of anything but blue. This silence effaces green memories and hollows my life.
Silence becomes my body: a bell echoes another’s story. Ring it. Ring it. How else can I face what’s become of my absence.
ANNIE WENSTRUP (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press in March 2025). Annie is the recipient of the 10th annual New England Review Emerging Writer’s Award and is the 2024 Stephen Donadio Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Scholar. In 2023, she received the Alaska Literary Award and support from the Rasmuson Foundation. Annie has held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from The CIRI Foundation and was an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review , Ecotone , Poetry , and elsewhere. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with her family where she serves as a coordinator for Indigenous Nations Poets.
Introduction copyright © 2025 by Howard Norman.
Excerpt from Grief Hotel by Liza Birkenmeier. Copyright © 2020 by Liza Birkenmeier. Used by permission of Liza Birkenmeier. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Weird Black Girls by Elwin Cotman. Copyright © 2024 by Elwin Cotman. Used by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris. Copyright © 2017 by Emil Ferris. Used by permission of Fantagraphics. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Road to the Salt Sea by Samuel Kọláwọlé. Copyright © 2024 by Samuel Kọláwọlé. Used by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from AGATHA OF LITTLE NEON by Claire Luchette. Copyright © 2021 by Claire Luchette. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt from I’mAlways So Serious by Karisma Price. Copyright © 2023 by Karisma Price. Used by permission of Sarabande Books. All rights reserved.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan, excerpt from “Ocean Park #6” from Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays. Copyright © 2025 by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.
Shubha Sunder, excerpt from Optional Practical Training:ANovel. Copyright © 2025 by Shubha Sunder. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.
Excerpt(s) from WORN: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF CLOTHING by Sofi Thanhauser, copyright © 2022 by Sofi Thanhauser. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Museum of Natural Histories by Annie Wenstrup. Copyright © 2025 by Annie Wenstrup. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved.
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