The 2015 Whiting Awards

THE

Ten Winners OF THE

Anthony Carelli 2015 Whiting P O E TRY Awards Leopoldine Core F IC TI O N

Aracelis Girmay P O E TRY

Lucas Hnath

DR A M A

Jenny Johnson P O E TRY

Dan Josefson F IC TI O N

Elena Passarello

N O N F IC TI O N

Roger Reeves

P O E TRY

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi F IC TI O N

Anne Washburn

DR A M A

INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

ABOUT THE WHITING FOUNDATION AND AWARD INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

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Anthony Carelli

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Leopoldine Core

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Aracelis Girmay

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Lucas Hnath

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Jenny Johnson

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Dan Josefson

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Elena Passarello

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Roger Reeves

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Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

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Anne Washburn

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THE WINNERS OF THE WHITING AWARD, 1985–2015

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P O E TRY

F IC TI O N

P O E TRY

DR A M A

P O E TRY

F IC TI O N

N O N F IC TI O N

P O E TRY

F IC TI O N

DR A M A

WHITING FOUNDATION TRUSTEES

Antonia M. Grumbach, President John N. Irwin III, Treasurer Peter Pennoyer Kate Douglas Torrey

ABOUT THE

Whiting Foundation and Award

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, dramaturgs, and directors of literary festivals. Winners are chosen by a selection committee comprised 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 three decades.

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INTRODUCTION BY

Michael Cunningham MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award), Specimen Days, By Nightfall, and The Snow Queen, as well as the nonfiction book, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He received a Whiting Award in 1995.

We all know that most young writers are in desperate need of money.

There is, however, another, less widely-recognized fact about most young writers—they’re in desperate need of hope, of confirmation, of some sign that they’re not engaged in a categorically doomed enterprise.

I speak as a writer who was once young myself.

There’s a myth about the uber-confident, brash aspiring author who strides into the professor’s or agent’s or publisher’s office, smacks some nine-hundred-plus pages down onto the desk, and says, “Get a load of this work of genius. Do you want to be the lucky one who announces me to history?”

I’ve met maybe two or three such young writers in my by-now-long teaching career. The nine-hundred-plus pages in question have always been . . . let’s just say, other than brilliant.

One common aspect of giftedness is an exquisite, sometimes wildly exaggerated, sense of one’s own shortcomings, if for no other reason than the fact that a gifted writer almost inevitably imagines a greater work than mere flesh can produce, using only ink, paper, and language. A gifted writer, at any age, is thinking about writing something too vast to be written; a piece of writing for which there may not be a sufficient, known vocabulary.

No one is more available to this particular sense of limitation than a new writer.

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It is, I hasten to add—it proves to be—that strangest of contradictions: an invigorating limitation, one that (if we survive) can inspire a lifetime of attempts to surmount it.

We aspire to achieve that which “year by year recedes before us.

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—” Thank you, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Never mind what happened to Jay Gatsby.

It’s the constant, lifelong reaching for that which can never quite be reached that animates writing. It’s the conviction that with the next line, the next page— Writing that doesn’t aspire to be at least a little more than it can possibly be will probably fail to move us as deeply as fiction should.

There’s this, as well.

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Thank you, Samuel Beckett.

This is a profound truth. It’s full of severe but utterly unsentimental hope. And it’s easier to accept, it’s easier to see the perverse encouragement in it, at fifty-five than it is at twenty-five.

A Whiting Award has a deep and significant value, one that will probably matter long after the check has been spent on groceries and rent.

It’s the nod—often the first real nod—from that remote place known as The Literature Planet, which from Earth looks to be just slightly farther away than Jupiter. It’s the planet one longs to reach when young, but for which one feels prepared, by way of traversing the vast distance, only with the materials one has immediately at hand.

Go ahead. Get yourself to a planet near Jupiter with duct tape, twine, and scrap wood.

Which is, as it turns out, exactly how we get there. But who knew, at an early age?

Here’s to the Whitings, then, for not only helping to subsidize new writers but giving them to understand that they can in fact get to distant planets using only the materials that present themselves. Here’s to the Whitings for recognizing the nascent, the under-recognized, the writers who will in all likelihood never feel entirely confident (one shouldn’t) but will surely feel more confident after they learn they’ve been seen, they’ve been recognized, they’ve been embraced.

T HE

Ten Winners O F T HE

2015 Whiting Awards

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Anthony Carelli PO E T RY

“Sermon”

The poet is a liar.

—Fernando Pessoa Every morning we would hoist Victor’s father from the moist sheets, holding him for a third to sponge his flanks and milk-sack thighs.

“Put your elbow under the shoulder,” Victor instructed. “If his eyes open, you speak to him.”

One day a doctor interrupted our ritual.

“Look: I think your father smiles,” he said.

And turning back, we couldn’t help believing.

No matter our suspicion of the doctor’s simple savvy, nor the fact of a familiar face inverted, inert, we were children again, bodiless, it seemed, gathered and held kite-like above our father’s head, lifted up to pluck the last armful of apples— the best ones, he said: the ones he couldn’t reach.

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“The Builder” If I were called in to construct a religion I would make use of lumber, and naturally I would find the best lumber in the land.

There’s no shame in wanting your religion to last. If I’m building to accommodate the gods, I figure the platform should be nice and sturdy; the gods might be really heavy.

Besides, all kinds of people are sure to come and climb all over it, wear the thing out.

Therefore, if I build in Wisconsin, I’ll use oak; in New England, ironwood. And in Paraguay I hear there’s a flowering tree called lapacho with wood so rigid and heavy it outlives men.

I’d like to get my hands on some of that.

holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an M.F.A. from New York University. In 2011, he received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, AGNI online, Columbia, Memorious, and others. His first book, Carnations (Princeton University Press, 2011) was a finalist for the 2011 Levis Reading Prize. Carelli teaches expository writing at New York University. He is originally from Wisconsin; he is currently based in Brooklyn.

ANTHONY CARELLI

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Leopoldine Core FICT I ON

attended Hunter College.

In 2012, she was a Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow and a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Veronica Bench, her poetry collection, will be published this year by Coconut Books. Her story collection will be published by Penguin in 2016. She lives in New York.

LEOPOLDINE CORE

Ned sat waiting on the black couch. He wore a gray felt hat with a top crease. As they approached, he removed the hat and bowed his head.

Then a foolish smile came across his face. Ned seemed to be mocking the prospect of his own politeness. He was no gentleman and clearly found this hilarious.

The receptionist led them to a large room with one mirrored wall and a creaky king-size bed. The three of them got naked and it all felt very clinical. The room was a bit cold. Ned seemed giddy. It was as if his depression had receded for the duration of their encounter, only while he was seeing something for the first time. He stood alongside the bed and motioned to it until the girls climbed on. “You’re an odd couple,” he said, waving his finger at them. “One big and one skinny. But that must be part of the turn-on.” He grinned. “Calm down. I’m kidding.”

A pained smile transformed Lucy’s face, her opalescent skin flooding again with color. She was posed like a mermaid on a rock, yellow hair half covering her breasts. Kit made a concerted effort not to stare.

Lucy’s kisses were muscular with no feeling behind them. She broke into breathy counterfeit moans and Kit cringed. Their teeth clicked. Kit felt a bit the way men must feel, she supposed, when they realize that the prostitute they’ve purchased is miserable to be near them. She wasn’t sure why she had expected it to be any other way. I’m just another creep who wants to touch her, she thought. A little creep hiding behind a bigger one.

Afterward the sky outside was a gray peach. They rode the train to Lucy’s apartment with amazed expressions. Once home, Lucy lit the candles by her bed. It was as if someone had died. Kit searched her face

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for disgust, but there was only hurt. Lucy sat on the floor beside Curtis, mechanically stroking his muscles.

They ordered Chinese food and stood in the kitchen, eating lo mein from take-out containers. Lucy’s glazed look of pain dissipated. She hummed and Kit hated her a little bit. For pretending to be unmarked by the last few hours. And by every other terrible hour of her life. Curtis hopped madly at their ankles. His cries were comically bad, as if a blade were being driven into his body.

“Is he okay?” Kit asked.

“He’s fine,” Lucy said. “Those are the screams of a manipulator.”

She scraped brown slop from a can into a little blue bowl and set it down on the floor. Curtis trotted over with a look of slack-jawed joy. He bent down to eat.

“He appears well behaved when he’s eating,” Kit said.

“Everyone does,” Lucy said.

Kit set her lo mein by the sink. “Am I your only friend?” she asked.

“I don’t mean that in a bitchy way. I don’t have any others.”

Lucy stared at her. “In a way you are. I used to have a lot of friends.”

Kit had never had a lot of friends. But she’d had a few that she didn’t have now. Becoming a whore is like getting very sick, she thought. You don’t want people and they don’t want you. Only she did want people.

A little.

“Ned’s daughter is dying of cancer,” Kit blurted.

“He told you that today?”

“No. Before. I should have told you. I just didn’t want you to feel sorry for him.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“Really?”

“I don’t feel anything for these people,” Lucy said dryly.

Kit reached into her bag and felt around. She wondered what Lucy did feel. Outside, an ambulance wailed by, its twirling red lights passing over the ceiling. She lit a joint and stood with it burning between her fingers. “I don’t know why I get high,” she said. “My mind is so inherently trippy.”

“Maybe you should quit.”

“Maybe.” Kit let herself stare at Lucy. It was a quiet burning stare.

Her eyes blazed, pouring with feeling. Lucy continued to eat, as if she did not notice. But she did.

From “Hog for Sorrow”

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Aracelis Girmay PO E T RY

holds a B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. from New York University.

She is the author of two poetry collections, Teeth (Curbstone, 2007) and Kingdom Animalia (Continuum, 2011), for which she won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2011 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Girmay has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Jerome Foundation, the Watson Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She currently teaches poetry as an assistant professor at Hampshire College.

Originally from Santa Ana, California, she splits her time between New York and Amherst, Massachusetts.

ARACELIS GIRMAY

“Cooley High, Fifth Estrangement

1991” I guess it’s a funny thing, really, how I can’t hear Boyz II Men, even the ’90s bedroom countdown & the color blue of Michael McCrary’s “Injection, fellas” without wanting to cry. A real cry. Look! I’ve slipped into the surprise & trapdoor of my own heartache just like that. The Cooleyhighharmony on repeat in the tapedeck as my mom & I drove up to boarding school, my first year. 1991. & though I’ve tried, I can’t stop being touched by the borrowed car, my mother’s hands, the steering wheel a kind of clock we moved with toward the finish line. We rode, a slow unfurling of ourselves across a hundred twenty miles, despite history, despite warnings of colored kids washed by books, or kerosene & lye in the white yards of schools far from their fathers & the stars. And still, hundreds of us tumbling out of our houses to be half raised. The ghosts of children from the Perris Indian School did come down from the hills, all the way from Riverside, to watch the odd quiet of our take-leavings. Their hairs thick with cactus & grave dirt. The prickly pears of their mouths warning, Some parts of you will die there. I can still see it all so clearly now. The school gate is—a carving knife.

This is the future Mom chooses for me & she drives me to my dormitory, room

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different from the one I woke in beside my cousin & small sister, brother sleeping in the trundle. I have been thrown into new orbit. This is an old story. Distance in the name of opportunity.

The complicated sacrifice, & so on.

But I could have stayed home for so long. With my people.

Helped around the house. Gotten a job.

In Chicago, my mother’s hometown, the death toll climbs like a serpent up the red graph.

We are 2,000 miles away, but the deaths of black kids everywhere are at her neck. So this is what she chooses for me. I am not gifted, no more than Angel or Sargeant or LeNara or most anybody, really, but know how to read & to obey the rules of tests, & the academic officer says “hope” & “promise” to my mother whose own mother would not choose my mother who turns her back, & suddenly the car (with her hands) is leaving. I think, Who will be my parent now? as the orange trees dot the coming darkness with their small fires, & not far the sadness of oaks & dry brush. Still, the car (with her hands) leaving.

Please stay with me as I replay the last touch. My face buried in her hair & neck. How I am quiet, & let her say “This is the best thing” though I disbelieve it, even now.

She was my mother, after all, & president of nothing.

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Lucas Hnath DR AMA

WALT.

ROY.

cut to,

Walt says to Roy time to work

nice enough place

ROY.

ROY.

. . . okay

I suppose

WALT.

WALT.

’cuz now I’m going to make a city, an actual, a city

what

ROY.

one feels safe when one is there.

okay

WALT.

WALT.

no accidents, no deaths.

because I’ve made a theme park, and that’s like a city

ROY.

ROY.

WALT.

not really

no

WALT.

ROY.

thinking about how it’s kind of perfect thinking about how well it works

well

ROY.

ROY.

you

they happen

WALT.

WALT.

solved the problem of problems

death happens, but not

ROY.

ROY.

it’s a WALT.

happens off site, far away, miles away, people are removed if

perfect

WALT.

WALT.

You agree.

ROY.

well

WALT.

no

Yes

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The Christians was produced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville for the 2014 Humana Festival. It will premiere in New York at Playwrights Horizons in 2015. A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney was produced by Soho Rep in 2013. Other plays include Red Speedo (Studio Theatre, 2013); nightnight (Humana Festival, 2013); Isaac’s Eye (Ensemble Studio Theatre, 2013); Death Tax (Humana Festival 2012; Royal Court Theatre, 2013). Hnath’s work is published by Dramatists Play Service.

He has been a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011, and is a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre. He is the recipient of a Whitfield Cook Award and a Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award Citation. In 2016, his play, Hillary and Clinton, will premiere in Chicago. He lives in New York and holds a B.F.A. and M.F.A. from New York University’s Department of Dramatic Writing.

LUCAS HNATH ’s

ROY.

if they’re sick, if they’re WALT.

say it like it’s cheating.

ROY.

not a place where problems don’t exist.

The problems there are there, they’re just dealt with behind the scenes, back rooms, underground, far away WALT.

there’s no need to bother everyone, there’s no need to make a big deal out of it, show it, see it, because dealing with problems in a way that makes a big deal isn’t really helping anyone.

People panic.

People get scared.

People think problems are problems because they see problems as problems, but if you don’t see the problems to see the problems as problems, there aren’t problems.

Close on Roy.

Close on Walt.

Close on Roy and Closer on Roy and Closer and ROY.

Okay.

WALT.

It works.

From A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney

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Jenny Johnson PO E T RY

“Souvenirs” 1.

The boots of the dead poet were size 11, licorice-black with a stitch of blue up the calf.

Without the long legs that once filled them, sent them scuffing through the San Joaquin valley, they slouch on an oak pedestal in the university library next to a white placard that tells an anecdote about the writer’s irreverence at staff meetings, his casual drop of the f-bomb. Standing this close, I wonder if my ogling is offending him, or if he might nudge me, gently, longing to make a joke out of the strangeness of the scene, the way absence blinds us to the scale of our attachment to someone else’s objects.

poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2012, Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics, New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, and Waxwing, and she has just completed her first collection, In Full Velvet. Johnson was the recipient of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for her poem “Aria.” She has also received awards from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She earned an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. An educator as well as a poet, she taught public school for several years and spent ten summers on the staff of the University of Virginia Young Writer’s Workshop. Johnson is currently a lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

JENNY JOHNSON ’s

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2.

I loved a woman who curated loss.

She was a sculptor. After we had parted in rage at the corner of 16th and Dolores, after our old bed frame slid off the car roof, splinters flurrying down I-80, after I’d moved thousands of miles away, she called to ask if she might build out of sugar cubes a replica of my house.

She said, for herself, she needed to see it but didn’t know the measurements.

I cannot explain my consent that evening alone in my bungalow, the yellow tape unspooling, I measured closet widths, calculated the feet between hedges— I wanted her to craft it perfectly to scale.

3.

When my grandmother died, my aunt lifted her camera at the small funeral, toggled the zoom button and started taking pictures of the blue-veined hands, fingers draped along the blue polyester dress, clasped across a plump body in a mahogany casket.

When someone asked her why she was doing it, she mentioned the macramé, the doll parts, the needlepoint, all the things her mother used to do with those hands.

Someone sitting beside me wanted to stop her then, beg her to sit down, to leave the body be.

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Dan Josefson FICT I ON

DAN JOSEFSON holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a B.A. from Williams College. He received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Romania in 2002. He worked as a freelance writer for the Las Vegas Mercury, and has been Assistant Editor of the Junior Library Guild in New York since 2006. His novel, That’s Not a Feeling (Soho, 2012), was a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He lives in Brooklyn.

I turned when the door opened and took a step back when I saw Tidbit.

She was short, with a thick waist and large breasts. When I caught myself staring, I quickly looked around to see if anyone else was there.

Turning back, I thought it was strange that she walked toward me normally, as though nothing were out of the ordinary. I assumed girls walked differently when they were naked, and it briefly occurred to me that it was because all the naked women I’d seen were in photographs, where they generally wore high heels.

She leaned her hip against the desk and looked me in the eyes. She wore glasses with round, red frames. “You’re new here, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I got here today.”

“I saw you kick the window out of your parents’ car.”

“Oh. I didn’t think anybody saw that.”

“I was under some bushes. And then them dragging you in. What’s your name?”

“Benjamin. I’m Benjamin.”

“I’m Tidbit. Here, look at this.” She turned around and held her hair away from her nape to show me a tattoo on the back of her neck.

My eyes followed the curve of her spine down to her waist and hips before looking back up to see what she was showing me. It was a homemade tattoo in blue ink that said, simply, TIDBIT. “Can you see it?” she asked.

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“Yeah. The tattoo.”

“My friends did it.”

“Here?”

“No, at home.” She turned back around.

“Is that why you got sent here?”

“No.” “So what are you here for?”

Tidbit stared at me. “I have a self-afflicting personality,” she said.

I nodded. The pulse of blood in my skull had slowed to a drowsy thump. Her face was sweet, not too pretty. A soft, round forehead, a wide nose. There was something about her that seemed restless and oversensitive. The frames of her glasses cast a rounded shadow across her cheek. “Aren’t you worried about getting into trouble?” I asked.

“Why? We’re not doing anything.”

“I know.”

“So, did you meet Aubrey?” Aubrey was the headmaster.

“For a minute. He didn’t say much.” I was struggling to return her gaze. “Is he nice?”

“Nice? No. He’s fucking crazy.” Tidbit picked a pencil up from the desk and began playing with it. “My first day here, he bit me.”

I followed Tidbit’s eyes down to look at the pencil in her hands, stole a glance at her breasts. “What?”

“Well, I bit him first.” She laughed.

“Still.”

“I know,” Tidbit said, looking up. “It’s part of his philosophy.”

I felt like we should be talking about something else. “He was okay with me. He just ate a salad.”

“Here’s all you need to know about Aubrey: at breakfast once, he came out of the bathroom with this long strip of toilet paper hanging out of the back of his pants. It was like a tail, it reached all the way down to the ground, dragging through the Cafetorium behind him. Of course everyone was terrified to tell him because who knows what he’d do. And I know some of the teachers and dorm parents saw because they were careful not to step on it. But nobody said anything. When Aubrey finally sits down in the armchair at Campus Community and sees it, you know what he says?”

I shook my head. “ ‘I have never felt so alone.’ ” From That’s Not a Feeling

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Elena Passarello NO N F I CT I ON

Not too long after landing, a Cross spider spins her first full web. She casts a line outward, waits to feel it catch, and then secures the other end of the line to the spot where she rests. This creates a single-strand bridge that she can walk across, which she does, reinforcing it with a second bridge line. Once suspended from the center of that bridge, she free-falls, still pumping silk to form a Y-shape. She then pulls strand after strand from her body, spinning and falling, climbing and plummeting, hooking each strand to the crotch of that Y. Soon, a dozen spokes branch from the Y-hub like a silken sunburst.

Without stopping, she turns sideways and circles the spokes, connecting them in thirty cartwheeled spirals. Here is when she switches the gears of her body to produce a stickier silk—viscid enough to trap heavy prey. With this silk she weaves a second spiral. After that’s done, she eats the first spiral, then she eats the hub, and finally she arranges herself in the hub’s place. And though she will never rate a vantage to see her handiwork (even if she could, her eyes can’t focus at such a distance), the young spider has just filled her space with one of our earth’s most spectacular pieces of craftsmanship, just as versions of herself have done for 110 million years. It takes her about half an hour.

NASA spent a decade designing Skylab’s orbital workshop, and the final blueprint held limited consideration for up and down. Rather than separate its two levels with a solid floor, a crosshatching of beams split the workshop like an open, metallic net. A long blue pole ran through the center of that net, so the astronauts could pull themselves along the fifty-five feet of the workshop, but the crew scrapped the pole shortly after getting their space bearings. They preferred pushing off the walls and steering with their arms, floating through that empty center to travel from the workshop’s fore level—site of the dinner table, the latrine, and the three booths in which they slept bolted to the walls—to the aft level—with its radio and TV equipment, its biophysics lab, its

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ELENA PASSARELLO holds a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her essays have appeared in Oxford American, Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Slate, Iowa Review, and Normal School. New essays are forthcoming this year in the anthologies After Montaigne and Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong. Passarello is an assistant professor of English at Oregon State University; she also worked for a decade as an actor and voice-over performer. Passarello’s first book, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande, 2012), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She is currently at work on a collection of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, forthcoming from Sarabande in 2016. Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, she lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

materials processors, and its plastic vial the size of a human thumb containing a young Cross spider named Arabella.

A spider was built to strum her web like a guitar. She was built to pluck a radial with one striped tarsal claw and feel how the pull of the world changes the vibration of her web. She was built to spin more sticky strands at web-bottom than at web-top, as gravity makes jumping down to her prey less taxing than climbing up to it. She was built to drop a gossamer line and free-fall from danger, to walk the strands of her handiwork upside-down, using her weight as propulsion.

For nothing says “spider” more than this built-in vigilance, this innate knowledge of what pushes her into the earth and what lifts her away from it. Her legs, claws, mouth, the silk she unspools from inside herself, they all understand—with the hair-trigger sensitivity that comes from eons of experimenting—the facts of our massive planet trying to collide with her body.

From “Arabella”

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Roger Reeves PO E T RY

“Some Young Kings” The Mike Tyson in me sings like a narwhal minus the nasally twang of sleeping in a cold ocean, the unsightly barnacles latched to the mattress of skin just below my eye, the white horn jutting out from the top of my head— oh god bless us mutts—the basset-bloodhound mulattoes, the pug-mixed puppies left behind the dog pound’s cinder-block walls as German Shepherds, Labradoodles, and Portuguese water dogs turn their inbred behinds and narrow backs at our small-mouthed blues.

It’s hard to smile with an ear in your mouth, two names, and a daughter hanging by a thread from the railing of a treadmill. Oh neck and North Carolina and a white coat of paint for all the faces of my negro friends hanging from trees in Salisbury.

Greensboro. And Guilford County.

The hummingbirds inside my chest, with their needle-nosed pliers for tongues and hammer-heavy wings, have left a mess of ticks in my lungs and a punctured lullaby in my throat. Little boy blue come blow your horn. The cow’s in the meadow.

And Dorothy’s alone in the corn with Jack, his black fingers, the brass of his lips, the half-moons of his fingernails clicking along her legs until she howls—

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Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker.

Oz is a man with a mute body on an HBO original show that I am too afraid to watch for fear of finding my uncle, or a man that looks like my uncle, which means finding a man that looks like me in another man’s embrace or slumped over a shiv made from a mattress coil and a bar of Ivory soap.

Most young kings return home without their heads.

It’s 1941, and Jack Johnson still loves white women, and my mother won’t forgive him.

If she can’t use your comb, don’t bring her home, my mother says in 1998. It’s 2009, and I still love white women.

Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker.

Often, I click the heels of my Nikes together when talking to the police, I am a cricket crushed beneath a car’s balding black tires.

Most young kings return home without their heads.

ROGER REEVES received an M.F.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas, Austin. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Best American Poetry, and the Indiana Review, among other publications, and he was included in Best New Poets 2009. Reeves was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2008; he is also the recipient of two Bread Loaf Scholarships and a Cave Canem Fellowship. In 2012, Reeves received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize for his poem “The Field Museum.” He is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a 2014–2015 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University.

King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013) is Reeves’s first book.

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Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi FICT I ON

AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI is the author of Fra Keeler (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2012). Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The American Reader, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, The Coffin Factory, &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, Words without Borders, and elsewhere. Fra Keeler has been translated into Italian and is forthcoming from Giulio Perrone Editore in 2015. From 2010 to 2011, Van der Vliet Oloomi was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Catalonia, Spain. She subsequently received a research grant from the Instituciรณ de les Lletres Catalanes in Barcelona to study the work of Catalan author Josep Pla. She holds a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.F.A. from Brown University. She has lived in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, Italy, Singapore, and the United States, and currently teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Notre Dame.

27

When I pushed away from the glass, I could see my reflection in the window. I was holding the club. I thought, it isn’t me holding the club, it is only my reflection in the window. Just as I was only blind in the space of my sleep, I am only holding the club in the space of the window.

Clearly, I thought, the window is more alive than anything else, because one moment it is a flat surface full of reflections and the next it is as transparent as a translucent sheet of skin. As opposed to the skylight, I thought, the window. A flock of birds flew overhead and I thought, more alive than the flock of birds and the skylight, the window, and swung the club overhead, because I wanted to see if I could catch my reflection swinging the club toward the window. But the clouds were still there, sucking all the light out of the window, so I didn’t see myself, and I thought, really the skylight is dead compared to the window. Because the window is always capturing the light and stirring it about in different directions, versus the skylight, which is just there, unchanging and inextricable. Nothing should be inextricable, I thought, and grabbed the ladder, which was on the side of the house, to get up onto the roof.

“Why not?” I asked. A moment later I found myself standing on the roof, staring down at the skylight with the club in my hand.

Surely the skylight is dead, I thought, because it is the same as it was before; nothing removed, nothing more accumulated. I raised the club over the skylight just as I had raised it over my head near the window. I thought, everything is a lie; things evaporate, they should be made to show how easily they can evaporate. It is a lie when everything that is always about to evaporate gives the impression that it is doing the opposite, not evaporating at all. And the skylight is the epitome of all lies, I thought, because it goes on and on as though nothing were deteriorating, nothing were evaporating, as though things could be permanent. One minute you’re blind, the next minute you’re not.

The duplicity of things is unbearable, I thought, and with the club gently tapped the skylight. Goat-skin, a sheer, light skin, I thought, and tapped the club a second time against the glass. Then I raised the club over my shoulder. I wanted to gather force in my swing, to come down onto the skylight. Everything accumulates strength just before it goes down, I thought, and tightened my grip on the club.

From Fra Keeler

28

Anne Washburn DR AMA

SUSANNAH

MATT

I ran into a guy in the Walmart.

We were talking about duct tape—there isn’t any left at the Walmart, of course, and I never got any before because I thought, well, really, what’s the use, and now I’m sorry because it’s handy and I hate going into houses, I’m not good with the stink, so we were talking about where would still have it—he had a really good suggestion, which is the janitorial areas at schools—and anyway we were talking about duct tape, and he had a cousin who worked at a nuclear power plant, Oyster Creek it’s near Asbury Park and he said

Indian Point is actually a lot closer.

JENNY

Where is that. Where is Asbury Park. How many miles from here.

JENNY

How much closer.

SUSANNAH

About thirty.

There is a pause.

SAM

What did he say? The guy. You ran into him at the Walmart and he said.

SUSANNAH

He said that they’re that what happens is that when the plant operators take the plant offline that the cooling pools, which is where, you know.

MATT

GIBSON

is reaching for his atlas.

Right.

MATT

SUSANNAH

It’s around a hundred.

That that whole system continues to operate and that the radioactivity, the rods, are fine, basically, for as long as

JENNY

A hundred.

29

ANNE WASHBURN ’s work has been produced by 13P, American Repertory Theater, Cherry Lane Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, Dixon Place, Ensemble Studio Theater, London’s Gate Theatre, Soho Rep., D.C.’s Studio Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Vineyard Theatre. Her plays have been published

by American Theatre, Theater Magazine, and Playscripts. She holds a B.A. in theater and literature from Reed College and an M.F.A. from New York University.

Washburn has held several MacDowell and Yaddo residencies between 2008 and 2013, and was a 2009 Guggenheim fellow. Her play Mr. Burns was produced at Playwrights Horizons in the fall of 2013 and at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2014; The Internationalist was first produced at 13P in 2004.

there’s electrical power to the plant. They just sit there, it’s fine. And that when the power goes out there are massive generators, and they continue to power the plant and the cooling pools for weeks. But then they run out of fuel.

And the electricity stopped, and the fires started and everyone is really distracted, and he realizes, he gradually realizes, You know I don’t think anyone is thinking about this.

And the weeks are kind of . . . ticking away.

JENNY

JENNY

JENNY

The fires were before.

Yeah, I’m just. All right. Before.

After. Before.

The fires started before the grid went down.

MATT

The big fires. The crazy explosions. Those were after.

JENNY

Not where I was.

SAM

It depended on where you were.

MATT

Babe.

MATT

The fires. No. The fires were after.

From Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play

T HE

Winners O F T HE

Whiting Awards 1985–2015

32

Raymond Abbott, Fiction, 1985

Eduardo C. Corral, Poetry, 2011

André Aciman, Fiction, 1995

Mark Cox, Poetry, 1987

David Adjmi, Drama, 2010

Douglas Crase, Poetry, 1985

Ellen Akins, Fiction, 1989

Justin Cronin, Fiction, 2002

Daniel Alarcón, Fiction, 2004

Stanley Crouch, Nonfiction, 1991

Jeffery Renard Allen, Fiction, Poetry, 2002

Michael Cunningham, Fiction, 1995

Mindy Aloff, Nonfiction, 1987

Charles D’Ambrosio, Fiction, 2006

Elizabeth Arnold, Poetry, 2002

Michael Dahlie, Fiction, 2010

John Ash, Poetry, 1986

Lydia Davis, Fiction, 1988

Kirsten Bakis, Fiction, 2004

Connie Deanovich, Poetry, 1997

Catherine Barnett, Poetry, 2004

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Fiction,

Elif Batuman, Nonfiction, 2010

Nonfiction, 2013

Jo Ann Beard, Nonfiction, 1997

Trudy Dittmar, Nonfiction, 2003

Mischa Berlinski, Fiction, 2008

Matt Donovan, Poetry, 2010

Ciaran Berry, Poetry, 2012

Mark Doty, Poetry, 1994

Sherwin Bitsui, Poetry, 2006

Jennifer duBois, Fiction, 2013

Scott Blackwood, Fiction, 2011

Bruce Duffy, Fiction, 1988

Judy Blunt, Nonfiction, 2001

Pam Durban, Fiction, 1987

Courtney A. Brkic, Fiction, 2003

Stuart Dybek, Fiction, 1985

Joel Brouwer, Poetry, 2001

Gerald Early, Nonfiction, 1988

Jericho Brown, Poetry, 2009

Russell Edson, Poetry, 1989

Michael Burkard, Poetry, 1988

Kim Edwards, Fiction, 2002

Michael Byers, Fiction, 1998

Louis Edwards, Fiction, 1994

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Fiction, 2005

Erik Ehn, Drama, 1997

Ryan Call, Fiction, 2011

Gretel Ehrlich, Nonfiction, 1987

Sheila Callaghan, Drama, 2007

Nancy Eimers, Poetry, 1998

Anthony Carelli, Poetry, 2015

Deborah Eisenberg, Fiction, 1987

Hayden Carruth, Poetry, 1986

Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry, 2005

Emily Carter, Fiction, 2001

Jeffrey Eugenides, Fiction, 1993

Joan Chase, Fiction, 1987

Roger Fanning, Poetry, 1992

Alexander Chee, Fiction, 2003

Anderson Ferrell, Fiction, 1996

Dan Chiasson, Poetry, 2004

Kathleen Finneran, Nonfiction, 2001

Don Mee Choi, Poetry, 2011

Ben Fountain, Fiction, 2007

Paul Clemens, Nonfiction, 2011

Jonathan Franzen, Fiction, 1988

Robert Cohen, Fiction, 2000

Kennedy Fraser, Nonfiction, 1994

Christopher Cokinos, Nonfiction, 2003

Ian Frazier, Nonfiction, 1989

Amanda Coplin, Fiction, 2013

Nell Freudenberger, Fiction, 2005

Leopoldine Core, Fiction, 2015

Forrest Gander, Poetry, 1997

33

Cristina García, Fiction, 1996

Samuel D. Hunter, Drama, 2012

David Gewanter, Poetry, 2002

Ishion Hutchinson, Poetry, 2013

Melissa James Gibson, Drama, 2002

Naomi Iizuka, Drama, 1999

Dagoberto Gilb, Fiction, 1993

Major Jackson, Poetry, 2003

Samantha Gillison, Fiction, 2000

Tyehimba Jess, Poetry, 2006

Aracelis Girmay, Poetry, 2015

Adam Johnson, Fiction, 2009

Jody Gladding, Poetry, 1997

Denis Johnson, Fiction, 1986

Allison Glock, Nonfiction, 2004

Jenny Johnson, Poetry, 2015

Molly Gloss, Fiction, 1996

R.S. Jones, Fiction, 1992

Rebecca Goldstein, Fiction, 1991

A. Van Jordan, Poetry, 2004

Allegra Goodman, Fiction, 1991

Dan Josefson, Fiction, 2015

Jorie Graham, Poetry, 1985

Rajiv Joseph, Drama, 2009

Lucy Grealy, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1995

Cynthia Kadohata, Fiction, 1991

Elana Greenfield, Drama, Fiction, 2004

Agymah Kamau, Fiction, 2003

Linda Gregg, Poetry, 1985

Ilya Kaminsky, Poetry, 2005

Gordon Grice, Nonfiction, 1999

Joan Kane, Paoetry, 2009

Virginia Grise, Drama, 2013

Seth Kantner, Fiction, 2005

Rinne Groff, Drama, 2005

Mary Karr, Poetry, 1989

Paul Guest, Poetry, 2007

Douglas Kearney, Poetry, 2008

Stephen Adly Guirgis, Drama, 2006

John Keene, Fiction, Poetry, 2005

Danai Gurira, Drama, 2012

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Poetry, 1996

Daniel Hall, Poetry, 1998

Randall Kenan, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1994

W. David Hancock, Drama, 1998

Brad Kessler, Fiction, 2007

Kent Haruf, Fiction, 1986

Laleh Khadivi, Fiction, 2008

Michael Haskell, Poetry, 1999

Suji Kwock Kim, Poetry, 2006

Ehud Havazelet, Fiction, 1999

James Kimbrell, Poetry, 1998

Terrance Hayes, Poetry, 1999

Lily King, Fiction, 2000

Alan Heathcock, Fiction, 2012

Brian Kiteley, Fiction, 1996

Amy Herzog, Drama, 2011

Matthew Klam, Fiction, 2001

Emily Hiestand, Poetry, 1990

Kevin Kling, Drama, 1993

Rick Hilles, Poetry, 2008

Wayne Koestenbaum, Nonfiction,

Lucas Hnath, Drama, 2015

Poetry, 1994

Eva Hoffman, Nonfiction, 1992

Tony Kushner, Drama, 1990

Donovan Hohn, Nonfiction, 2008

Natalie Kusz, Nonfiction, 1989

John Holman, Fiction, 1991

Mary La Chapelle, Fiction, 1988

Mary Hood, Fiction, 1994

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Fiction, 2010

Jay Hopler, Poetry, 2009

Victor LaValle, Fiction, 2004

Michelle Huneven, Fiction, 2002

Amy Leach, Nonfiction, 2010

34

Li-Young Lee, Poetry, 1988

Yxta Maya Murray, Fiction, 1999

Suzannah Lessard, Nonfiction, 1995

Lawrence Naumoff, Fiction, 1990

Dana Levin, Poetry, 2005

Howard Norman, Fiction, 1985

Mark Levine, Poetry, 1993

Bruce Norris, Drama, 2006

Yiyun Li, Fiction, 2006

Josip Novakovich, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1997

Ralph Lombreglia, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1998

Sigrid Nunez, Fiction, 1993

Nathaniel Mackey, Fiction, Poetry, 1993

Dennis Nurkse, Poetry, 1990

Rosemary Mahoney, Nonfiction, 1994

Geoffrey O’Brien, Nonfiction, 1988

Mona Mansour, Drama, 2012

Patrick O’Keeffe, Fiction, 2006

Micheline A. Marcom, Fiction, 2006

Chris Offutt, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1996

Ben Marcus, Fiction, 1999

Dael Orlandersmith, Drama, 2008

J.S. Marcus, Fiction, 1992

Daniel Orozco, Fiction, 2011

Anthony Marra, Fiction, 2012

ZZ Packer, Fiction, 1999

Dionisio D. Martínez, Poetry, 1993

Ann Pancake, Fiction, 2003

Nina Marie Martínez, Fiction, 2006

Suzan-Lori Parks, Drama, 1992

Cate Marvin, Poetry, 2007

Elena Passarello, Nonfiction, 2015

Shane McCrae, Poetry, 2011

Lydia Peelle, Fiction, 2010

Tarell Alvin McCraney, Drama, 2007

Janet Peery, Fiction, 1993

Alice McDermott, Fiction, 1987

Kathleen Peirce, Poetry, 1993

Reginald McKnight, Fiction, 1995

Benjamin Percy, Fiction, 2008

John McManus, Fiction, 2000

Andrew X. Pham, Nonfiction, 2000

James McMichael, Poetry, 1995

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Poetry, 2013

Scott McPherson, Drama, 1991

Claudia Roth Pierpont, Nonfiction, 1994

Jane Mead, Poetry, 1992

Darryl Pinckney, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1986

Suketu Mehta, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1997

Katha Pollitt, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1992

Morgan Meis, Nonfiction, 2013

Reinaldo Povod, Drama, 1987

Ellen Meloy, Nonfiction, 1997

Padgett Powell, Fiction, 1986

Michael Meyer, Nonfiction, 2009

Stephanie Powell Watts, Fiction, 2013

Meg Miroshnik, Drama, 2012

Hanna Pylväinen, Fiction, 2012

Albert Mobilio, Fiction, Poetry, 2000

Hugh Raffles, Nonfiction, 2009

C.E. Morgan, Fiction, 2013

Keith Reddin, Drama, 1992

Wright Morris, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985

Spencer Reece, Poetry, 2005

Sylvia Moss, Poetry, 1988

Roger Reeves, Poetry, 2015

Thylias Moss, Poetry, 1991

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Nonfiction, 2012

Brighde Mullins, Drama, 2001

Mark Richard, Fiction, 1990

Nami Mun, Fiction, 2009

Atsuro Riley, Poetry, 2012

Manuel Muñoz, Fiction, 2008

Harriet Ritvo, Nonfiction, 1990

Yannick Murphy, Fiction, 1990

José Rivera, Drama, 1992

35

Lewis Robinson, Fiction, 2003

Melanie Rae Thon, Fiction, 1997

James Robison, Fiction, 1985

Christopher Tilghman, Fiction, 1990

Rick Rofihe, Fiction, 1991

Peter Trachtenberg, Nonfiction, 2007

Carlo Rotella, Nonfiction, 2007

Vu Tran, Fiction, 2009

Jess Row, Fiction, 2003

Judy Troy, Fiction, 1996

Mary Ruefle, Poetry, 1995

Jack Turner, Nonfiction, 2007

Sarah Ruhl, Drama, 2003

Mark Turpin, Poetry, 1997

Michael Ryan, Poetry, 1987

Samrat Upadhyay, Fiction, 2001

Russ Rymer, Nonfiction, 1995

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi,

Luc Sante, Nonfiction, 1989

Fiction, 2015

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nonfiction, 2010

A.J. Verdelle, Fiction, 1996

James Schuyler, Poetry, 1985

William T. Vollmann, Fiction, 1988

Salvatore Scibona, Fiction, 2009

D.J. Waldie, Nonfiction, 1998

Danzy Senna, Fiction, 2002

David Foster Wallace, Fiction, 1987

Anton Shammas, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1991

Anthony Walton, Nonfiction, 1998

Akhil Sharma, Fiction, 2001

Anne Washburn, Drama, 2015

Lisa Shea, Fiction, 1993

Teddy Wayne, Fiction, 2011

Julie Sheehan, Poetry, 2008

Charles Harper Webb, Poetry, 1998

Mona Simpson, Fiction, 1986

Kerri Webster, Poetry, 2011

Evan Smith, Drama, 2002

Joshua Weiner, Poetry, 2002

Tracy K. Smith, Poetry, 2005

Timberlake Wertenbaker, Drama, 1989

Dalia Sofer, Fiction, 2007

Kate Wheeler, Fiction, 1994

Jason Sommer, Poetry, 2001

Colson Whitehead, Fiction, 2000

Elizabeth Spires, Poetry, 1996

Marianne Wiggins, Fiction, 1989

Jane Springer, Poetry, 2010

Amy Wilentz, Nonfiction, 1990

Matthew Stadler, Fiction, 1995

Damien Wilkins, Fiction, 1992

James Thomas Stevens, Poetry, 2000

Claude Wilkinson, Poetry, 2000

Frank Stewart, Poetry, 1986

Greg Williamson, Poetry, 1998

Ruth Stone, Poetry, 1986

August Wilson, Drama, 1986

Patricia Storace, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1996

Tracey Scott Wilson, Drama, 2004

Kelly Stuart, Drama, 2000

Tobias Wolff, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1989

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Nonfiction, 2004

John Wray, Fiction, 2001

Melanie Sumner, Fiction, 1995

Austin Wright, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985

Mary Swander, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1994

C.D. Wright, Poetry, 1989

Margaret Talbot, Nonfiction, 1999

Franz Wright, Poetry, 1991

Lysley Tenorio, Fiction, 2008

Stephen Wright, Fiction, 1990

Clifford Thompson, Nonfiction, 2013

Martha Zweig, Poetry, 1999

LB Thompson, Poetry, 2010

No award was granted in 2014

PERMISSIONS

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Michael Cunningham.

Excerpts from Carnations. Copyright © 2015 by Anthony Carelli. Carnations was published by Princeton University Press in 2011. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Hog for Sorrow.” Copyright © 2015 by Leopoldine Core. “Hog for Sorrow” will appear in her forthcoming story collection from Penguin.

“Cooley High, Fifth Estrangement 1991.” Copyright © 2015 by Aracelis Girmay.

First published in Granta 126, Winter 2014 as “Cooley High.”

Excerpt from A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney. Copyright © 2015 by Lucas Hnath. Published by Dramatists Play Service Inc in 2014. All rights reserved. The performance stage rights for this play are available and controlled by Dramatists Play Service (www.dramatists.com/).

All other inquiries should be directed to ICM Partners: Attn: Val Day, aday@icmpartners.com.

“Souvenirs.” Copyright © 2015 by Jenny Johnson. From the forthcoming collection of poems, In Full Velvet.

Excerpt from That’s Not a Feeling. Copyright © 2015 by Dan Josefson. Published

by Soho Press in 2012. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Arabella” from Animals Strike Curious Poses. Copyright © 2015 by Elena Passarello. Forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2016. All rights reserved.

“Some Young Kings” from King Me. Copyright © 2013 by Roger Reeves. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press (www.coppercanyonpress.org).

Excerpt from Fra Keeler. Copyright © 2015 by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.

Published by Dorothy, A Publishing Project in 2012. All rights reserved.

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Excerpt from Mr. Burns © Anne Washburn 2014. Published by TCG in 2014; all rights reserved. The performance stage rights for this play are available and controlled by Samuel French http://www.samuelfrench.com/. All other inquiries should be directed to ICM Partners Attn: Val Day aday@icmpartners.com.

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