The 2016 Whiting Awards

The Ten Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards Brian Blanchfield

N ON F I C T I ON N ON F I C T I ON POET RY

Mitchell S. Jackson

F I C T I ON

P OETRY P O E TRY

Alice Sola Kim Catherine Lacey

FICTION POETRY

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs Madeleine George

DR A M A

FIC T I ON

J. D. Daniels

Layli Long Soldier Safiya Sinclair

Ocean Vuong

INTRODUCTIO N BY BEN FOUNTAIN

The Ten Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards

ABOUT THE WHITING FOUNDATION AND AWARD INTRODUCTION BY BEN FOUNTAIN

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Brian Blanchfield

10 12 14

24 26 28 30

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

Mitchell S. Jackson

18

22

J. D. Daniels

Madeleine George

16

20

5

Alice Sola Kim Catherine Lacey

Layli Long Soldier Safiya Sinclair

Ocean Vuong

THE WINNERS OF THE WHITING AWARD, 1985–2016

W H IT ING F O U ND ATI O N TR U S TE E S

Peter Pennoyer, President John N. Irwin III, Treasurer Amanda Foreman Kumar Mahadeva Kate Douglas Torrey Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary T R U ST EES EM ER I TI

Antonia M. Grumbach Robert M. Pennoyer

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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 awards and fellowships, and their work has shaped and advanced literature in this country over the past three decades.

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INTRODUCTION

Ben Fountain

Here’s a proposition: It all depends on language. Society, civilization, progress, whatever you want to call it: the entire project depends on the quality of our thought and expression, our ability to put words to the reality of a thing. This is a rare and even radical act in an age where so much of the language that’s thrown at us is trying to sell something—a product, a lifestyle, a political agenda, an alleged means to a more beautiful version of ourselves. Language whose sole purpose is to mislead and distort, to numb out and dumb down. To call it by another name: the language of advertising.

But what’s wrong with being, as the Pink Floyd song says, “comfortably numb”? Nothing, maybe, until life hits us with something real, and maybe it’s in the existential moments of our lives that we most fully realize how false most of modern discourse is, when we’re faced with the kinds of crises that lead us to ask, Why?, and that have no clear answer.

“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” These lines are from a poem

by William Carlos Williams, who, in addition to being one of the finest poets this country has produced, was a family doctor who delivered thousands of babies, dealt with death in a hundred forms. Williams had a close working relationship with the most basic realities of human life, and here he is staking a claim to poetry’s fundamental usefulness. What an outrageous proposition for this day and age, that poems are useful, even necessary—that they might actually save lives. But maybe not so outrageous when you consider that it’s the job of writers to see things as they truly are; to find the language that describes human experience fully, without sentimentality, or a political agenda, or a wish to please the reader.

Keeping the language accurate, vital, true to all the mystery and challenge of reality, that’s the job of writers, and short of the immediate saving of lives—Dr. Williams’s other job—I can think of no work that’s more important. Congratulations to the Whiting Award winners of 2016. Keep writing as though the fate of the world depends on you.

Because it does.

BEN FOUNTAIN has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, an O. Henry Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes, among other honors and awards. He is the author of the collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award.

He and his family live in Dallas, Texas. He won a Whiting Award for fiction in 2007.

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The Ten Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards

10

NONFICTION

Brian Blanchfield

A few things became clear in the moments and months after I was attacked by a dog at age nine. Within months, it was clear that my consequent fear of dogs had engaged a far greater fear. Within moments, it was clear that the dog, our dog, Sam, was my father’s dog, loyal to him foremost. Sam, a mature blue-black purebred Chow, rushed to the door one evening just as I did, to meet my father who had been away awhile.

My mother was in the kitchen. We had just moved back to Charlotte, from Paris, Tennessee, undoing the relocation we all had made when he left Roadway to work for Transcon nine months earlier. He was sort of at large, still, out on days-long interstate truck runs and still stationed in Tennessee, without us, orchestrating the sale of the life that never quite took. The tractor trailer he parked outside shook the Charlotte house a bit. At the back door, his dog and his son had both come to welcome him; and when he appeared there, Sam turned to his rival in the tight space of the mud room and in a single motion, prefaced by a low growl, seized and ripped the flesh off the right side my face, cheek to jawbone—so that in the stunned minutes thereafter, both of my parents would later say they could see my clenched back teeth when my mouth was closed.

Sam was banished instantly to the back lot, or retreated there ashamed, confused; and swiftly we made preparations to ride to the emergency room. Despite spilling blood and saliva where my face had been, I was numb to the pain, doing as I was instructed, completely mobile, cooperative with the towels, functioning in shock. On my father’s lap—so rarely availed to me—in the passenger seat, as my mother drove, I was prevented from flipping the visor down to see the damage in the mirror but repeated often that one desire, to see for

BRIAN BLANCHFIELD ,

a poet and essayist, is the author of three books, including two collections of poetry: Not Even Then (University of California Press, 2004) and A Several World (Nightboat Books, 2014), which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was long-listed for the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry. His third book, Proxies, is a collection of essays forthcoming from Nightboat in April 2016. His recent work has appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, The Paris Review, Brick, Guernica, Lana Turner, and other publications. Since 2010, Blanchfield has been a poetry editor of Fence, and he currently serves as a guest editor of the PEN Poetry Series. Blanchfield is originally from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

myself what was clearly disturbing my parents, neither of them even thirty years old, it now occurs to me, the year they divorced. What was the damage, was the question, yes, but also, what does it look like inside me? I could hardly contain myself.

A plastic surgeon was airlifted in, and that night I had reconstructive surgery, and came away sewn up with many stitches inside and outside my mouth. A phenomenal operation, everyone said. It was 1982, and with insurance then, I suppose, a secretary and a truck driver could afford it. I was swollen and in bandages for weeks, a pathetic, dopey monster at school for a while; and then the wound became scar and for the next eight years tightened and traveled from my cheek to my chin as I grew into the face I have. There are a lot of nerve endings gathered in it, and it drives me a little crazy, distributes a sort of unsettling, illocable energy within, when a lover plays with that part of my face. I feel the same about my navel.

It’s my recollection that the Winicottian psychologist and essayist Adam Phillips himself extrapolates broadly from his analysis of tickling; but, if not, the generality I have found so insightful is mine: beyond any fear is a greater circumambient fear—a terror—that one will be insufficiently able to hold that fear.

From “On Containment, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source”

12

NONFICTION

J. D. Daniels J. D. DANIELS studied at the University of Louisville and Boston University.

His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, n+1, Oxford American, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Daniels is the recipient of The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection, The Correspondence, will be published

by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017.

We sang about the blood Wednesday nights at church suppers, Thursday nights at choir practices, mornings and evenings on Sundays, and every summer at a peacock-ridden revival camp in Alabama.

The old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine. There is a fountain filled with blood. I must needs go on the blood-sprinkled way. He bled, He died to save me. How I love to proclaim it, redeemed by the blood.

They vainly purify themselves, said Heraclitus, by defiling themselves with blood, just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing thus would deem him mad.

Our pastor had a method. After his sermon, we sang “Just As I Am” over and over again—without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me, and so on. We would sing until someone gave in. We sang all day.

It was the same unrelenting method of the middle school phys-ed coach who, perceiving that Weak Henry was weak, hit on the technique of making the whole class do extra push-ups until Henry finished his

allotted twenty. Henry couldn’t make it happen. We did twenty more, thirty more, forty; and after class, Demetrius and Alonzo beat Henry in the locker room until he peed.

One morning, after an hour of “Just As I Am,” my mother shrieked and fell into the aisle. My father helped her stand. His face was strange.

The two of them knelt and prayed at the altar. A nice old lady wearing a white gauze eye patch smiled. I waited to see what the people who told me what to do were going to tell me to do next.

It was this child grown into a man, then, if anyone ever grows up, who now drove past Lynn Camp Baptist Church, who drove past Hazel Fork Holiness Church and Living Waters Pentecostal Church, who drove past Faith Tabernacle Pentecostal Church and Turkey Creek Baptist Church short of breath, sweating like a sinner, drowning in blood.

I played Jesus one year and Judas the next in the passion play. I taught Vacation Bible School, and visited and sang hymns to the homebound, and, all that rigamarole having been accomplished, I chased the preacher’s daughter through the cornfield after Sunday evening services until I caught her.

And my father mowed the field out back of our church. He helped Deacon Jack repaint the sanctuary and he helped Deacon Willy reshingle the roof. He cooked and served at the Wednesday night church suppers and was happy to do it. But he didn’t have much time for what he called churchified people.

“I find it difficult to believe that the Creator of the universe gives a fuck if I drink a cold beer on a sunny day,” my father said. “These people can’t say sugar, they just got to say sucrose. Meanwhile they don’t have no more idea what God wants from me than the man in the moon. It’s my own dick I’m talking about, and I can jump up and down on it like a pogo stick if I want to.”

From “Letter from Kentucky”

14

POETRY

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

Benihana

rūma moe : bedroom cuisine

she wishes Rocky usada cookbooks

niho : nitro libido

samurai diced & sliced

sweet & sour calypso in a hotei tiki mug

baby-girl knows he burned the rice

she wishes Rocky a rave kei : at Che Fong’s bungalow uru : enter the binghi harps played by Duke Lukela she wishes Rocky tossed oriental shrimp y huevos in a hot tub korā : over there Kono Kalakaua is manning the grill his backgammon trophy awaits him in heaven an afterlife supply of jheri curl kits saketini on the house

a rave in his name

in virtuous timbre she mantras, “come now, no more faking blackouts.”

Japanese custom

Rocky’s poly

konā: there, ka tākaro ngā tamariki ki waho with Ginsu knives the children will play outside Chin Ho Kelley is attending to them she wishes Rocky muziek di zumbi, a day with Sizzla in a hot-air balloon a Hummer-converted ice cream truck te tae : the color of kikorangi : blue

a collage of sugar cones & strawberry road on DVD his wrestling pecs in high-res

he did not patent the fortune cookie, but . . .

pequino manu, no strife from Bobos down Lenox Ave. pūrnimā : night of full moon, night of vaudevillian lineage someone did not read the omikuji she wishes Rocky an odò kāshmīrī dam gōsht pepper steak

hea : where?

mua : in front of heroes & foes konei : here she wishes Rocky moe : sleep passage in not an abébuu adekai fashioned like his teppanyaki but his speedboat severing Bullwinkle’s spleen somewhere in Iceland she wishes Rocky jouk & Wonderbras abundant two centerfolds for the price of one

a rave in his name

a place where he eats his celestial tsujiura senbei uru : enter again the binghi harps played by Duke Lukela he’s finally escaped the Blacks and the Jews

A writer, vocalist, and sound artist, LATASHA N. NEVADA DIGGS is the author of TwERK (Belladonna*, 2013), a collection of poems, songs, and myths, and the cofounder and coeditor of Coon Bidness and SO4. Her work has appeared in many publications, including Rattapallax, Nocturnes, Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Ploughshares, Mandorla, P.M.S., jubilat, Everything But the Burden, ART21 Magazine, Palabra, and Fence. Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at MoMA, the Walker Art Center, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the 2015 Venice Biennale. As an independent curator, artistic director, and producer, LaTasha has produced literary/musical events for Lincoln Center Out of Doors, BAMCafé, Black Rock Coalition, the David Rubenstein Atrium, and El Museo del Barrio. A native of Harlem, Diggs has been the recipient of numerous awards from organizations such as the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Laundromat Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Japan–United States Friendship Commission, and Creative Capital.

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MADELEINE GEORGE ’s

DRAM A

Madeleine George

ELIZA : I have to change my

ELIZA pours a little Jim

number.

Beam into a plastic cup, removes a Twizzler from the bag, and holds up both.

WATSON : You don’t like

your number?

She silences her phone, pockets it.

ELIZA : I like it fine. Frank

likes it too much. This is his eighteenth call since I said I wasn’t speaking to him anymore. By which I meant, literally, (precise) that I would never be speaking to him anymore.

He knows I don’t say anything I don’t literally mean. I’m not about games.

WATSON

(a trigger):

Games?

ELIZA : No, I’m not about

games. Never mind, I should shut up, you’re not even listening.

(continuing): Little known fact that you can file away in your mental wheelhouse, there: Twizzlers dipped in Jim Beam makes an excellent late-night snack.

ELIZA

WATSON grins, a little

impishly.

WATSON : I’ll be sure to

keep that in mind.

ELIZA : This is how we roll

now at Digital Fist, LLC. Nothing but class.

ELIZA dips the Twizzler,

bites the end off, sips the whiskey.

(continuing): I’d offer you some, but I know how you feel about WATSON (ardent): I’m listen- the stuff. ing to every word you say.

WATSON : Yeah, thanks for ELIZA

(simple): Thanks.

ELIZA

the offer, but I’m good.

plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Shotgun Players, and Perseverance Theater, among other venues. She has been the recipient of a MacDowell

(toasting him): You’re the best.

ELIZA

(reflects) You know, it’s not just that we couldn’t have a conversation about anything that was important to me. We couldn’t have a conversation about anything that was important to me, but that didn’t distinguish him from ninety-eight percent of the other human beings on the planet. It’s that we couldn’t have a conversation and he still needed to be on me, constantly, every second of our lives.

And he seemed so serene when I met him. I swear, if he could have left me alone for five minutes I might not have had to leave him alone forever.

She drinks.

WATSON : It sounds like

that’s too bad.

Fellowship, the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, and the Jane Chambers Award. A resident playwright at New Dramatists, George was also a founding member of the collective 13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.), which won an Obie Award.

Her play The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. For seven years, George was the director of the Bard College satellite campus at Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan. She is originally from Amherst, Massachusetts, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

ELIZA : It is too fucking

ELIZA : No, I mean, sort

ELIZA : How far are you

bad. (beat) Hey, don’t use that word.

of, but what’s the other one . . . ?

now? You getting there?

WATSON : I’m twenty-six

WATSON : What word?

WATSON : Do you mean

percent complete.

ELIZA : “Fucking.” Strike

Romancing the Stone?

ELIZA : Not bad. You

“fucking.”

ELIZA : No—what’s the one

WATSON : “Fucking”

where Michael Douglas spends the entire two hours in an unrelieved seizure of violent rage?

get through this initial resequencing, and I will build you out so gorgeously in beta that the venture capital guys at Pearson Klein will be falling all over themselves to fund Phase Two. I’m going to make you irresistibly sexy.

stricken.

ELIZA : I keep forgetting.

I need a swear jar or something. (drinks) I guess what I really resent is that I’m being told that I’m acting irrationally, that I’m acting irrationally, when he’s the one running around like Michael Douglas in that movie. Which movie am I thinking of?

WATSON searches —micropause.

WATSON : Movies that

WATSON : Do you mean

associate “Michael Douglas” with “violent rage” include Wall Street, WATSON : That sounds great.

The War of the Roses, Basic Instinct, and Falling ELIZA : In fact, I should Down. really leave you alone.

I shouldn’t be clogging ELIZA : That’s the one, that’s the one! Thank you. up your brain with dumb search tasks. But you’re Nice work. just such a satisfying WATSON glows brighter. conversationalist. You WATSON (warm): I’m so always have an answer for glad I could help. everything.

Fatal Attraction?

ELIZA drinks. She checks

WATSON searches—a tiny

beat.

the time on her phone.

From The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence

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FICTION

Mitchell S. Jackson

Peoples, you listening?

Bet. This is how it go.

If you’re cold enough they name you.

Clutch or Jack Knife or K-Dub or 3-D or Dead Eye or D-Reid or Big Third or Smooth or DaBell—score twenty or thirty a season, and bam, you’re Stu or Pickle or Free or Fish or Big Blass or King Cole or Doc—they’ve christened you T-hop or B-hop or Pooh or Fluff or the Honey Bee or Houseguest or B-Moore or J. D. or Bookie. Handle your biz lugis luge and everywhere they’ll say your name, call out T-Cage, T. T., Gumby, Banger, A-Train, Nickle, Action, P-Strick, JoJo, L. V., T-Jones, Blazer.

We’re talking MVPs and state champs and first-team All-Everythings, dudes who any day you wanted it would kill your weak ass at the park.

In my city, hoop’s the hegemony.

debut novel The Residue Years (Bloomsbury, 2013) was praised by publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Times (London). The novel won the Ernest Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. It was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Center for Fiction.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Tin House, among other publications. He serves on the faculty at New York University and Columbia University.

MITCHELL S. JACKSON ’s

In the Rose City, the P, what the deal is, if they name you, you’re anointed. And in the P that’s what we cherish, what we love if nothing else: Year after year after year we harangue who’s greatest of the ones who dropped 40s and 50s pre a three-pointer, which phenoms scored 60! 70! 80! Guys named J-Bird or Zelly-Roo or T. B. or D-Stoud or Slash or T-Bone or T-Ross or T-Hamp or Juice or Ice or Silk—middle school man-childs who played not a lick beyond the eighth, or the luckierthan-thous who hang-timed off to college handcuffed by the city’s collective hope. The General and 2-Ounce and Stretch and Big City and Slider and Truck and Duke and the one we named the GOAT: legends, a few of them, all-leaguers in every league they played.

My word, a nickname is a christening, meaning you got a shot, meaning they think you can go, which is one chance more than most of us, so no wonder the chosen are all there is to speak of. No wonder when, for most, hoop’s about our only shot to be better and bigger than the rest, to secure a life that counts.

But on the flip side, fall short and then what?

From The Residue Years

20

FICTION

Alice Sola Kim

Deena didn’t invite me to her birthday party, so I crashed it. Specifically, I inhabited every last person at her party. I waited until after everyone got into her apartment. I became thirty-six people. The sensation was almost too much, I could barely carry on ten conversations and one of me got a terrible nosebleed that poured out of my nostrils as suddenly and smoothly as poured wine. Somewhere else in the room, a beer bottle slipped from my hand, and rolled over on the floor. A puddle fanned out around my feet and burbled quietly to itself. Keep. It. Together.

This is the last time, I had said into the mirror at home. This time something has to happen. Maybe we can all line up. Maybe Deena will choose one of me. Maybe Deena will choose the one she might be able to love from a catalog. I think we can discuss this like adults. My chest was angry and red from repeated applications of toothpaste.

ALICE SOLA KIM ’s

fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tin House, Lenny Letter, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons, among other publications. Kim was a MacDowell Colony Fellow and has received grants and scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is currently working on her first novel and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

I was Vishal, one of Deena’s coworkers from the health bureau. I said to her, “You look exhausted. Is everything okay?”

She said, “I don’t know. Things haven’t been going well for me.”

“How so?” I said. Vishal’s mustache felt heavy against my lip.

Deena smiled a little, a smile that expressed only tiredness. “A lot of people have been hitting on me these days.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Isn’t it?

“No. It is not.” She had lost a bit of weight, hadn’t she? From behind her, I saw how the pale knobs of her vertebrae jutted out above the neck of her sweater. She said, “But if I tell you why it’s not a good thing, you’re going to think I’ve gone insane.”

“Oh, Deena,” I said. I gave her a careful pat on the back. She started to cry. I came closer to her, folded my arms around her. It’s okay, it’s okay, I said. Oh, I’m so sorry.

At that, Deena lifted her head. We had all stopped talking, stopped playing at being thirty-six different people at a party. We were thirtysix people who were all me and all loved Deena, looking at only her and wanting her and pressing ever closer.

“Oh no,” she said. “Get away.”

“I’ll be whatever you want,” we said. “See how?” She was shaking her head as though she could shake us all out of her sight.

Imagine a room full of people who love you, who adore your body and thoughts and words. I can’t even imagine such riches. Deena was lucky.

We were a kicking chorus line of people who loved Deena! A battalion of soldiers who would give their lives for Deena! A synchronized swimming team who fluttered and kicked for an audience of only Deena!

From “We Love Deena”

22

CATHERINE LACEY has

FICTION

Catherine Lacey

published work in Oxford American, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The New York Times, VICE, AFAR, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, a recipient of a NYFA Artist’s Fellowship, and a resident at the Omi International Arts Center. In the fall of 2016, she will be the Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. She is the author of the novel Nobody Is Ever Missing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Her second novel and first story collection are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

They looked and made quick calculations: a 7 percent chance of con artistry, 4 percent chance of prostitution, 50 percent chance of mental instability, 20 percent chance of obnoxiousness, a 4 percent chance of violent behavior. I was probably none of these things, at least not at first, but to all the passing drivers and everyone else in this country I could be anything, so they just slowed, had a look, made a guess, kept driving.

Women, they’d squint quickly, make a worried face, continue on.

Men (I later learned) stared from the farthest distance—their eyes trained to stay on me in case I was something they needed to shoot or capture—but they hardly ever stopped. Up close, I was not so promising: just a woman wearing a backpack, a cardigan, green sneakers. And young-seeming, of course, because you must seem young to get away with this kind of vulnerability, standing on a road’s shoulder, showing the pale underside of your arm. You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.

But I didn’t know any of this at first—I just stood and waited, not knowing that wearing sunglasses would always leave me stranded, not knowing that wearing my hair down meant something I did not mean, not knowing that my posture had to be so carefully calibrated, that I should always stand like a dancer ready to leap.

Only two cars and fifteen minutes passed before someone stopped, a black truck driven by a sun-wrinkled old lady wearing a straw hat.

Into town? she asked, and I took this as a chance not to make a decision, to just agree.

While we drove she asked me about myself and I found it impossible to answer anything honestly. She asked what had brought me to New Zealand and I said that my husband had. She asked me what my

husband did and I said he was a farmer.

Well, he wants to be a farmer, I said. That’s why he’s here.

Everything grows here, the old woman said proudly. All sorts of plants and other things. Do you have children?

I laughed by accident, the kind of laugh that didn’t say you thought something was funny.

No. Well, my goodness. I suppose women really are putting off having children these days. You ought to get to it. I only bring it up because there is no joy in life greater than an empty house. Don’t let the other women fool you with this empty-nest-syndrome stuff. Life gets better once the kids are out and the sooner you have them the sooner they can leave.

Ah. Okay, I said.

What’s even better is finally being a widow.

The woman started laughing and laughing and laughing so much I felt like I had to laugh, too, so I did and then I realized we were laughing at how her husband was dead, which really didn’t seem so funny, and I think we realized that at the same time, and we both stopped laughing and there was that deeply quiet moment after two people have laughed too much and we let that quiet moment stay for the rest of the drive.

During that silence, I thought of the night when my husband and I were having one of the arguments about the way we argue and I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water but instead picked up a knife because I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt—and picked up a chef’s knife, our heavy good one that I used for everything from cutting soft fruit to impaling pumpkins, and looked at it, laughed a noiseless laugh, put the chef’s knife down, poured myself a glass of water, and drank it fast, until I choked a little, and I went back to arguing with my husband and he didn’t know about my face-stabbing thoughts and it made me even angrier that he didn’t know about my face-stabbing thoughts, that he couldn’t just intuit these things, look into my eyes and know that the way he spoke to me was a plain waste of our life—but here in the car with the widowed stranger I didn’t have to feel any of those feelings anymore because I had left my husband and our arguments and my chef’s knife and I had come to this country where I could laugh, so gently, gently laugh at things that were actually not funny.

From Nobody Is Ever Missing

24

POETRY

Layli Long Soldier

One. H^e Sapa is a horn is a mountain, is a black horn or black mountain, as it is the same in this language. Remember. And is not a black hill, not Paha Sapa, by any name you call it. When it lives in past tense, one would say it was not Red Horn either; was not a rider on mount on horse and did not lead a cavalry down the river and bend, not decoy to ambush and knee buckle

to ten or twenty, perhaps every horse face in water.

Its rank is a mountain and must live as a mountain as a black horn from the base to the black horn tip. See it as you come, you approach. To remember it, this is like gravel.

Two. Because drag changes when spoken of in the past i.e. he was dragged, or they drug him down the long road, the pale rock and brown. Down dust, a knocking path. And to drag has a begin point (though two are considered): begins when man is bound; begins also with one first tug. So we take the word to our own uses and say: it begins with his head on the ground with his hair loose under shoulders and shirt with snaps, they’re mother-of-pearl. Then begins a yank and slide, begins his skin and scalp— begins a break a tear, red to pink to this precious white; then begins what is his skull, the glisten of star to bone.

holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She has served as a contributing editor of Drunken Boat.

Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, and other publications. She is the recipient of the 2015 NACF National Artist Fellowship and a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her work of poetry, WHEREAS, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. Long Soldier resides in Tsaile, Arizona, where she is an English faculty member at Diné College.

LAYLI LONG SOLDIER

Three.

The space in me you see is this place

This is how to place you in the space in which to see

This is how you see the space in which to place me

To see this space see how you place me in you

From “H^e Sapa”

26

POETRY

Safiya Sinclair

Home Have I forgotten it— wild conch-shell dialect, black apostrophe curled tight on my tongue?

to still believe in anything.

My diction now as straight

Or how the Spanish built walls of broken glass to keep me out

as my hair; that stranger we’ve long stopped searching for.

but the Doctor Bird kept chasing and raking me in: This place

But if somehow our half-sunken hearts could answer, I would cup

is your place, wreathed in red Sargassum, ancient driftwood

my mouth in warm bowls over the earth, and kiss the wet dirt

nursed on the pensive sea.

The ramshackle altar I visited

of home, taste Bogue-mud and one long orange peel for skin.

often, packed full with fish-skull, bright with lignum vitae plumes:

I’d open my ear for sugar cane and long stalks of gungo peas

Father, I have asked so many miracles of it. To be patient and forgiving,

to climb in. I’d swim the sea still lapsing in a soldered frame,

to be remade for you in some small wonder. And what a joy

the sea that again and again calls out my name.

Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda I too am gathering the vulgarity of botany, the eye and its nuclei for mischief.

Of Man, redacted I came, am coming, fasting, starving carved myself a selfish idol, its shell unsuitable. I, twice discarded, arrived thornside, and soon outgrew his reptilian sheen. A fine specimen. Let me have it.

Something inviolate; splayed in bird-lime, legs an exposed anemone, against jailbait August, its X-ray sky. This light a Gorgon-slick, polygamous doom. And God again calling much too late, who aches to stick an ache in my unmentionable.

His Primal Plant remains elusive— Wildfire and pathogen, blood-knot of human fleshed there in His beard. How I am hot for it.

Call me murderess, a glowing engine timed to blow. Watch it go with unjealousy, shadow.

Let me have it. This maidenhead-primeval schemes what ovule of cruel invention; the Venus-trap, the menses.

And how many ways to announce this guilt: whore’s nest of ague, supernova, wild stigmata.

Womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum. Engorging shored pornographies, the cells’ unruly strain, rogue empire multiplying for a thousand virile thousand years; my wings pinned wide in parthenogenesis, such miraculous display.

SAFIYA SINCLAIR was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her debut collection, Cannibal, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for 2015, and will be published by University of Nebraska Press in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Callaloo, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and was the winner of the Boston Review’s eighteenth annual poetry contest.

Sinclair received an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia, and is currently completing a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California.

28

POETRY

Ocean Vuong

Telemachus Like any good son, I pull my father out of the water, drag him by his hair through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail the waves rush in to erase. Because the city beyond the shore is no longer where we left it. Because the bombed cathedral is now a cathedral of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far I might sink. Do you know who I am, Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer is the bullet hole in his back, brimming with seawater. He is so still I think he could be anyone’s father, found the way a green bottle might appear at a boy’s feet containing a year he has never touched. I touch his ears. No use. I turn him over. To face it. The cathedral in his sea-black eyes. The face not mine—but one I will wear to kiss all my lovers good-night: the way I seal my father’s lips with my own & begin the faithful work of drowning.

OCEAN VUONG holds a BA from Brooklyn College and will complete an MFA from NYU in 2016.

His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. He has published two chapbooks, No (2013) and Burnings (2010); his first full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2016. Vuong is the recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is originally from Saigon and lives in New York City.

Homewrecker & this is how we danced: our mothers’ white dresses spilling from our feet, late August turning our hands dark red. & this is how we loved: a fifth of vodka & an afternoon in the attic, your fingers through my hair—my hair a wildfire. We covered our ears & your father’s tantrum turned to heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed into a coffin. In the museum of the heart there are two headless people building a burning house.

There was always the shotgun above the fireplace. Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not the car, the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive, put down the phone. Because the year is a distance we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say: this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue.

30

The Winners of the Whiting Award 1985–2016

Raymond Abbott, Fiction, 1985 André Aciman, Fiction, 1995 David Adjmi, Drama, 2010 Ellen Akins, Fiction, 1989 Daniel Alarcón, Fiction, 2004 Jeffery Renard Allen, Fiction, Poetry, 2002 Mindy Aloff, Nonfiction, 1987 Elizabeth Arnold, Poetry, 2002 John Ash, Poetry, 1986 Kirsten Bakis, Fiction, 2004 Catherine Barnett, Poetry, 2004 Elif Batuman, Nonfiction, 2010 Jo Ann Beard, Nonfiction, 1997 Mischa Berlinski, Fiction, 2008

Ciaran Berry, Poetry, 2012

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Fiction,

Sherwin Bitsui, Poetry, 2006

Nonfiction, 2013

Scott Blackwood, Fiction, 2011

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Poetry, 2016

Brian Blanchfield, Nonfiction, 2016

Trudy Dittmar, Nonfiction, 2003

Judy Blunt, Nonfiction, 2001

Matt Donovan, Poetry, 2010

Courtney A. Brkic, Fiction, 2003

Mark Doty, Poetry, 1994

Joel Brouwer, Poetry, 2001

Jennifer duBois, Fiction, 2013

Jericho Brown, Poetry, 2009

Bruce Duffy, Fiction, 1988

Michael Burkard, Poetry, 1988

Pam Durban, Fiction, 1987

Michael Byers, Fiction, 1998

Stuart Dybek, Fiction, 1985

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Fiction, 2005

Gerald Early, Nonfiction, 1988

Ryan Call, Fiction, 2011

Russell Edson, Poetry, 1989

Sheila Callaghan, Drama, 2007

Kim Edwards, Fiction, 2002

Anthony Carelli, Poetry, 2015

Louis Edwards, Fiction, 1994

Hayden Carruth, Poetry, 1986

Erik Ehn, Drama, 1997

Emily Carter, Fiction, 2001

Gretel Ehrlich, Nonfiction, 1987

Joan Chase, Fiction, 1987

Nancy Eimers, Poetry, 1998

Alexander Chee, Fiction, 2003

Deborah Eisenberg, Fiction, 1987

Dan Chiasson, Poetry, 2004

Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry, 2005

Don Mee Choi, Poetry, 2011

Jeffrey Eugenides, Fiction, 1993

Paul Clemens, Nonfiction, 2011

Roger Fanning, Poetry, 1992

Robert Cohen, Fiction, 2000

Anderson Ferrell, Fiction, 1996

Christopher Cokinos, Nonfiction, 2003

Kathleen Finneran, Nonfiction, 2001

Amanda Coplin, Fiction, 2013

Ben Fountain, Fiction, 2007

Leopoldine Core, Fiction, 2015

Jonathan Franzen, Fiction, 1988

Eduardo C. Corral, Poetry, 2011

Kennedy Fraser, Nonfiction, 1994

Mark Cox, Poetry, 1987

Ian Frazier, Nonfiction, 1989

Douglas Crase, Poetry, 1985

Nell Freudenberger, Fiction, 2005

Justin Cronin, Fiction, 2002

Forrest Gander, Poetry, 1997

Stanley Crouch, Nonfiction, 1991

Cristina García, Fiction, 1996

Michael Cunningham, Fiction, 1995

Madeleine George, Drama, 2016

Michael Dahlie, Fiction, 2010

David Gewanter, Poetry, 2002

Charles D’Ambrosio, Fiction, 2006

Melissa James Gibson, Drama, 2002

J. D. Daniels, Nonfiction, 2016

Dagoberto Gilb, Fiction, 1993

Lydia Davis, Fiction, 1988

Samantha Gillison, Fiction, 2000

Connie Deanovich, Poetry, 1997

Aracelis Girmay, Poetry, 2015

32

Jody Gladding, Poetry, 1997

Mitchell S. Jackson, Fiction, 2016

Allison Glock, Nonfiction, 2004

Tyehimba Jess, Poetry, 2006

Molly Gloss, Fiction, 1996

Adam Johnson, Fiction, 2009

Rebecca Goldstein, Fiction, 1991

Denis Johnson, Fiction, 1986

Allegra Goodman, Fiction, 1991

Jenny Johnson, Poetry, 2015

Jorie Graham, Poetry, 1985

R. S. Jones, Fiction, 1992

Lucy Grealy, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1995

A. Van Jordan, Poetry, 2004

Elana Greenfield, Drama, Fiction, 2004

Dan Josefson, Fiction, 2015

Linda Gregg, Poetry, 1985

Rajiv Joseph, Drama, 2009

Gordon Grice, Nonfiction, 1999

Cynthia Kadohata, Fiction, 1991

Virginia Grise, Drama, 2013

Agymah Kamau, Fiction, 2003

Rinne Groff, Drama, 2005

Ilya Kaminsky, Poetry, 2005

Paul Guest, Poetry, 2007

Joan Kane, Poetry, 2009

Stephen Adly Guirgis, Drama, 2006

Seth Kantner, Fiction, 2005

Danai Gurira, Drama, 2012

Mary Karr, Poetry, 1989

Daniel Hall, Poetry, 1998

Douglas Kearney, Poetry, 2008

W. David Hancock, Drama, 1998

John Keene, Fiction, Poetry, 2005

Kent Haruf, Fiction, 1986

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Poetry, 1996

Michael Haskell, Poetry, 1999

Randall Kenan, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1994

Ehud Havazelet, Fiction, 1999

Brad Kessler, Fiction, 2007

Terrance Hayes, Poetry, 1999

Laleh Khadivi, Fiction, 2008

Alan Heathcock, Fiction, 2012

Suji Kwock Kim, Poetry, 2006

Amy Herzog, Drama, 2011

Alice Sola Kim, Fiction, 2016

Emily Hiestand, Poetry, 1990

James Kimbrell, Poetry, 1998

Rick Hilles, Poetry, 2008

Lily King, Fiction, 2000

Lucas Hnath, Drama, 2015

Brian Kiteley, Fiction, 1996

Eva Hoffman, Nonfiction, 1992

Matthew Klam, Fiction, 2001

Donovan Hohn, Nonfiction, 2008

Kevin Kling, Drama, 1993

John Holman, Fiction, 1991

Wayne Koestenbaum, Nonfiction,

Mary Hood, Fiction, 1994

Poetry, 1994

Jay Hopler, Poetry, 2009

Tony Kushner, Drama, 1990

Michelle Huneven, Fiction, 2002

Natalie Kusz, Nonfiction, 1989

Samuel D. Hunter, Drama, 2012

Catherine Lacey, Fiction, 2016

Ishion Hutchinson, Poetry, 2013

Mary La Chapelle, Fiction, 1988

Naomi Iizuka, Drama, 1999

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Fiction, 2010

Major Jackson, Poetry, 2003

Victor Lavalle, Fiction, 2004

Amy Leach, Nonfiction, 2010

Thylias Moss, Poetry, 1991

Li-Young Lee, Poetry, 1988

Brighde Mullins, Drama, 2001

Suzannah Lessard, Nonfiction, 1995

Nami Mun, Fiction, 2009

Dana Levin, Poetry, 2005

Manuel Muñoz, Fiction, 2008

Mark Levine, Poetry, 1993

Yannick Murphy, Fiction, 1990

Yiyun Li, Fiction, 2006

Yxta Maya Murray, Fiction, 1999

Ralph Lombreglia, Fiction,

Lawrence Naumoff, Fiction, 1990

Nonfiction, 1998

Howard Norman, Fiction, 1985

Layli Long Soldier, Poetry, 2016

Bruce Norris, Drama, 2006

Nathaniel Mackey, Fiction, Poetry, 1993

Josip Novakovich, Fiction,

Rosemary Mahoney, Nonfiction, 1994

Nonfiction, 1997

Mona Mansour, Drama, 2012

Sigrid Nunez, Fiction, 1993

Micheline A. Marcom, Fiction, 2006

Dennis Nurkse, Poetry, 1990

Ben Marcus, Fiction, 1999

Geoffrey O’Brien, Nonfiction, 1988

J. S. Marcus, Fiction, 1992

Chris Offutt, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1996

Anthony Marra, Fiction, 2012

Patrick O’Keeffe, Fiction, 2006

Dionisio D. Martínez, Poetry, 1993

Dael Orlandersmith, Drama, 2008

Nina Marie Martínez, Fiction, 2006

Daniel Orozco, Fiction, 2011

Cate Marvin, Poetry, 2007

ZZ Packer, Fiction, 1999

Shane McCrae, Poetry, 2011

Ann Pancake, Fiction, 2003

Tarell Alvin McCraney, Drama, 2007

Suzan-Lori Parks, Drama, 1992

Alice McDermott, Fiction, 1987

Elena Passarello, Nonfiction, 2015

Reginald McKnight, Fiction, 1995

Lydia Peelle, Fiction, 2010

John McManus, Fiction, 2000

Janet Peery, Fiction, 1993

James McMichael, Poetry, 1995

Kathleen Peirce, Poetry, 1993

Scott McPherson, Drama, 1991

Benjamin Percy, Fiction, 2008

Jane Mead, Poetry, 1992

Andrew X. Pham, Nonfiction, 2000

Suketu Mehta, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1997

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Poetry, 2013

Morgan Meis, Nonfiction, 2013

Claudia Roth Pierpont, Nonfiction, 1994

Ellen Meloy, Nonfiction, 1997

Darryl Pinckney, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1986

Michael Meyer, Nonfiction, 2009

Katha Pollitt, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1992

Meg Miroshnik, Drama, 2012

Reinaldo Povod, Drama, 1987

Albert Mobilio, Fiction, Poetry, 2000

Padgett Powell, Fiction, 1986

C. E. Morgan, Fiction, 2013

Stephanie Powell Watts, Fiction, 2013

Wright Morris, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985

Hanna Pylväinen, Fiction, 2012

Sylvia Moss, Poetry, 1988

Hugh Raffles, Nonfiction, 2009

34

Keith Reddin, Drama, 1992

James Thomas Stevens, Poetry, 2000

Spencer Reece, Poetry, 2005

Frank Stewart, Poetry, 1986

Roger Reeves, Poetry, 2015

Ruth Stone, Poetry, 1986

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Nonfiction, 2012

Patricia Storace, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1996

Mark Richard, Fiction, 1990

Kelly Stuart, Drama, 2000

Atsuro Riley, Poetry, 2012

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Nonfiction, 2004

Harriet Ritvo, Nonfiction, 1990

Melanie Sumner, Fiction, 1995

José Rivera, Drama, 1992

Mary Swander, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1994

Lewis Robinson, Fiction, 2003

Margaret Talbot, Nonfiction, 1999

James Robison, Fiction, 1985

Lysley Tenorio, Fiction, 2008

Rick Rofihe, Fiction, 1991

Clifford Thompson, Nonfiction, 2013

Carlo Rotella, Nonfiction, 2007

LB Thompson, Poetry, 2010

Jess Row, Fiction, 2003

Melanie Rae Thon, Fiction, 1997

Mary Ruefle, Poetry, 1995

Christopher Tilghman, Fiction, 1990

Sarah Ruhl, Drama, 2003

Peter Trachtenberg, Nonfiction, 2007

Michael Ryan, Poetry, 1987

Vu Tran, Fiction, 2009

Russ Rymer, Nonfiction, 1995

Judy Troy, Fiction, 1996

Luc Sante, Nonfiction, 1989

Jack Turner, Nonfiction, 2007

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nonfiction, 2010

Mark Turpin, Poetry, 1997

James Schuyler, Poetry, 1985

Samrat Upadhyay, Fiction, 2001

Salvatore Scibona, Fiction, 2009

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi,

Danzy Senna, Fiction, 2002

Fiction, 2015

Anton Shammas, Fiction,

A. J. Verdelle, Fiction, 1996

Nonfiction, 1991

William T. Vollmann, Fiction, 1988

Akhil Sharma, Fiction, 2001

Ocean Vuong, Poetry, 2016

Lisa Shea, Fiction, 1993

D. J. Waldie, Nonfiction, 1998

Julie Sheehan, Poetry, 2008

David Foster Wallace, Fiction, 1987

Mona Simpson, Fiction, 1986

Anthony Walton, Nonfiction, 1998

Safiya Sinclair, Poetry, 2016

Anne Washburn, Drama, 2015

Evan Smith, Drama, 2002

Teddy Wayne, Fiction, 2011

Tracy K. Smith, Poetry, 2005

Charles Harper Webb, Poetry, 1998

Dalia Sofer, Fiction, 2007

Kerri Webster, Poetry, 2011

Jason Sommer, Poetry, 2001

Joshua Weiner, Poetry, 2002

Elizabeth Spires, Poetry, 1996

Timberlake Wertenbaker, Drama, 1989

Jane Springer, Poetry, 2010

Kate Wheeler, Fiction, 1994

Matthew Stadler, Fiction, 1995

Colson Whitehead, Fiction, 2000

Marianne Wiggins, Fiction, 1989 Amy Wilentz, Nonfiction, 1990 Damien Wilkins, Fiction, 1992 Claude Wilkinson, Poetry, 2000 Greg Williamson, Poetry, 1998 August Wilson, Drama, 1986 Tracey Scott Wilson, Drama, 2004 Tobias Wolff, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1989 John Wray, Fiction, 2001 Austin Wright, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985 C. D. Wright, Poetry, 1989 Franz Wright, Poetry, 1991 Stephen Wright, Fiction, 1990 Martha Zweig, Poetry, 1999

36

PER MISSIO NS

Introduction copyright © 2016 by Ben Fountain Excerpt from “On Containment, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source” from Proxies. Copyright © 2016 by Brian Blanchfield.

Forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2016.

Excerpt from “Letter from Kentucky.” Copyright © 2016 by J.D. Daniels.

Published by The Paris Review in 2012. From The Correspondence, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017.

“Benihana” from TwERK. Copyright © 2016 by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.

Published by Belladonna* in 2013. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence. Copyright © 2016 by Madeleine George. Published by Samuel French in 2014. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from The Residue Years by Mitchell Jackson. Copyright © 2013

by Mitchell Jackson. Published by Bloomsbury USA. Reprinted with permission.

Excerpt from “We Love Deena.” Copyright © 2016 by Alice Sola Kim. Published

by Strange Horizons in 2008.

Excerpt from Nobody Is Ever Missing. Copyright © 2016 by Catherine Lacey.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “H^e Sapa.” Copyright © 2016 by Layli Long Soldier. Published by The Kenyon Review in 2012. From WHEREAS, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2017.

“Home” and “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda” will appear in Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair and are used by permission of the University of Nebraska Press.

Forthcoming fall 2016.

The Whiting Foundation 16 Court Street Suite 2308 Brooklyn, NY 11241 (718) 701 5962 whiting.org

DESIGN BY LANGUAGE ARTS

“Telemachus” and “Homewrecker” from Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Copyright © 2016 by Ocean Vuong. Forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2016.

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