The 2019 Whiting Awards

The Ten Winners of the 2019 Whiting Awards Kayleb Rae Candrilli Tyree Daye

P O E T RY

P O E T RY

Hernan Diaz

Michael R. Jackson Terese Marie Mailhot

D RAM A

N O N F I CT I O N

Nadia Owusu

Nafissa Thompson-Spires Merritt Tierce

I NTR O D UCTION BY M ARY K A R R

N O N F I CT I O N

F I CT I O N

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal Lauren Yee

F I CT I O N

F I CT I O N

P O E T RY

D RAM A

The Ten Winners of the 2019 Whiting Awards

ABOUT THE WHITING FOUNDATION AND AWARD

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INTRODUCTION BY MARY KARR

6

Kayleb Rae Candrilli

10

Tyree Daye

14

Hernan Diaz

18

Michael R. Jackson

22

Terese Marie Mailhot

26

Nadia Owusu

30

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

34

Merritt Tierce

38

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

42

Lauren Yee

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THE WINNERS OF THE WHITING AWARD, 1985–2019

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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 EMERI TI

Antonia M. Grumbach Robert M. Pennoyer

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About the Whiting Foundation and Award

The Whiting Foundation provides targeted support for writers, scholars, and the stewards of humanity’s shared cultural heritage. We believe their work deepens the human spirit and broadens individual perspective.

Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.

The Foundation invites nominators from across the country whose work brings them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent to propose a single candidate each. The pool of nominators changes annually, and has included writers, professors, editors, agents, critics, booksellers, artistic directors of theaters, dramaturges, and directors of literary festivals. Winners are chosen by a selection committee composed of a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors appointed every year by the Foundation. By tradition, nominators and selectors serve anonymously to allow them complete freedom in choosing the strongest candidates. Whiting winners have gone on to receive numerous prestigious fellowships and other awards, and their work has shaped and advanced literature in this country over the past three decades.

The Foundation’s other programs in support of literature include the Creative Nonfiction Grant, which enables the completion of deeplyresearched works in progress written for a general audience, and the Literary Magazine Prize, which celebrates the determined and devoted publications that nurture new writers. The Foundation also supports the humanities with the Public Engagement Program, for faculty who undertake projects to infuse the humanities into public culture at the local and national level, and grants to preserve endangered cultural heritage around the world. All the programs are intended to empower fresh thought and help bring it to the audiences who need it most.

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Introduction by Mary Karr

Receiving the Whiting marked the beginning of my career like a star decal on a map. Before it, I was wandering through a black landscape, scraping and bowing and lunging and clutching at any wisp of literary opportunity. I submitted my lady’s verses by the sheaf. I wrote reviews and essays for little mags. I spent more on postage and entrance fees in a year than I’d raked in from my writing over more than a decade, for I’d been doing all this since I was about twenty and dumb as milk.

The call came when I was thirty-four and feeding my three-yearold lunch and getting ready to grade about a hundred essays—a task more fun than writing about the economy for business dudes but not exactly a poet’s dream. The voice was warm but patrician: “This is Robert Pennoyer from the Whiting Foundation.”

I said, “Oh fuck you, George,” and hung up.

A friend and I had been prank-calling each other from the Nobel and MacArthur committees, and he’d started to bore me with it.

When the phone rang again, I picked it up and said nothing. A secretary gave me a 212 number to call back, and when the patrician voice came back on the line and I said, I am so sorry, I could hear laughter coming at me from a speaker phone. Somebody was giving the likes of me big beans—a grant I hadn’t even applied for! Manna from heaven.

The year before, my teaching income for four sections of comp and a poetry class at three universities in the academic ghetto around Boston was about $9,000, plus another ten or so, business writing. I woke at five to work on a novel, juggled a baby and husband, and slept in a fitful drowning state I often woke up from screaming. After we hung up, I grabbed my son and squeezed his body to mine and shouted, We won a prize! We went skipping through our small rental, hollering.

The early blessings count more than what comes later—cash and invites to shining isles and honorary this and thats. You get spoiled. No one likes to admit this, but it’s true. But before the Whiting, there was much disappointment.

At the reception, I met many literary editors whose names I’d only read, and I weaseled my way into a dinner with the agent who represented not a few of them. “You should write a memoir,” she said to me.

And I went home and started to knuckle down on the story I’d been jamming into fiction and poetry with little success for more than a decade. Six years later, it had turned into The Liars’ Club. It all started with that phone call.

So I urge everybody reading this to send up a hurrah for the young writers facing the same blessing I faced. They look young, but, I swear, each has come a far piece. Open your doors to them, meet them, invite them, welcome them. Above all, read them. This is new for them, and they’ll be wild with glee for the favor.

To them I say, damn it, good for you! Relish it. Remember this moment to give you courage through the inevitable failures literature demands of us. But you’ve had to soldier through disappointment to get here already, so you know this. Under every bad book sleeps a better one. I say to all of you for your readers’ sake: find it. We’re all hungry for what you’re just about to dare to say.

is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed and New York Times best-selling memoirs The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as the Art of Memoir, and five poetry collections, most recently Tropic of Squalor. Her many awards include an NEA, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. She is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Poetry magazine. Karr is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and she lives in New York City. She received a Whiting Award in Poetry in 1989.

MARY KARR

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The Ten Winners of the

2019 Whiting Awards

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Kayleb Rae Candrilli

P O E T RY

On the mountain

we used to feed each other

bullets to say I love you.

We used to walk around with

mouthfuls of slugs and feel weighed

deep down into the dirt.

My family is so far

apart now I can only

reach them by bullet.

I check my wristwatch and take

the curvature of the earth

into consideration.

I feed lead into my rifle’s

chamber and each round

has a name I chant.

:: Victoria :: Tori :: :: Peter :: Jerome :: :: Neives :: Your Lady of the Snows :: :: Our Lady of Sorrows ::

From What Runs Over

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in the house on the hill we hung coyotes on the wall and our lab bark-whimpered, confusing them for mirrors, or oracles, maybe even, a premonition of a strung up future. they hung there and i pet them, combed them for summer shed that wouldn’t come. i’ve never seen a wolf in the wild. elusive dog. but i’ve seen bears, bobcats, & lions built exclusively for the mountain, appalachian cats— sphinxes riddling away at me, boring holes. & daddy was always taking shots out the window exploding them to rorschach.

From What Runs Over

KAYLEB RAE CANDRILLI is author of What Runs Over , winner of the 2016 Pamet River Prize, with YesYes Books. They are also author of All the Gay Saints, winner of the 2018 Saturnalia Book Prize and forthcoming in 2020. Candrilli is published or forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Booth, and RHINO, among others. Candrilli was a 2015 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow in Nonfiction and a 2017 Fellow in Poetry. They live in Philadelphia.

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Tyree Daye

P O E T RY

“Say River, See River”

I threw up the river last night trout already gutted salamanders rocking between the books on my bedroom floor then the river stood up bowlegged it walked like it was drunk like it was an uncle so I followed the dizzy river into my mother’s backyard watched it fall and flood the houses pick itself up laugh it off we splashed past where the men slept on the ground their low eyes always where they laid at night I wondered if they counted the stars together until it turned into a Lightnin’ Hopkins’ song 21 22 my black dog blues

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if they played Spades for planets toasted Wild Irish Rose to the Seven Sisters the river took me to a big graveyard we didn’t cut through funneled around ran a damp finger along the fence the river would catch a name we passed the straight stones and every so often say one

Philips Jones

the dead heard the wet voice and started calling back River

TYREE DAYE is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections: River Hymns, the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Nashville Review. He won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship and is the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writers-In-Residence and a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist.

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Hernan Diaz

F I CT I O N

He was overwhelmed by an active, all-consuming hollowness—a corrosive shadow wiping out the world in its progress, a stillness that had nothing to do with peace, a voracious silence craving total desolation, an infectious nothingness colonizing everything. All that remained in its soundless, barren wake was an almost undetectable vibration.

But in the absence of everything else, this faint drone was unbearable.

Håkan had neither the will to make it stop (a simple task carried out with some sense of purpose, like keeping his course or cooking a meal, would probably have been enough) nor the strength to endure it. With the last dregs of consciousness he was able to scrape up, he managed to find a more or less hospitable spot with some water in it, surrounded by decent pasture fields. He tied the horse and the burro with long ropes, unpacked his tin box, and, from one of the vials kept there, took a few drops of Lorimer’s sedative tincture.

For a few moments—it was so fleeting—he did not matter, and that did not matter. There was sky. There was a body. And a planet underneath it. And it was all lovely. And it did not matter. He had never been happy before.

And it did not matter.

Like a sphinx, the burro was stretched out next to him. He thought it was a dream, since he had never seen the burro lying down. They looked at each other. Dawn hummed on the horizon, but how many nights had preceded this daybreak, he could not tell. His piercing sunburn reached his bones. The lines defining the things around him—the bush, the beasts, his feet—were brittle. His body felt tingly and hollow. He walked to the pond and drank the cloudy, creamy water. After making sure his animals had all they needed, he ate some charqui and a lump of sugar. With a blanket, the saddle, and a few bags, he built a simple shelter to block out the sun. He crawled under it and took another dose of the tincture.

This time, he did not experience the bliss of irrelevance. He was merely snuffed out. His eyes rolled back, but he was surprised to

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discover they were still able to see in the dark. They looked back into his cranium, at his own brain. With the part of his perception that was not involved in the process of seeing, he understood that his brain was receiving the images of itself from the eyes attached to it. It took his brain a moment to understand how extraordinary the situation was.

“What brain has ever seen itself?” it thought.

It also thought that its crevices, color, and texture were unique and entirely different from other human brains it had studied in the past. For a moment, the brain found the vertigo of having its own image of itself within itself dizzying and even amusing. Then it thought that it should pay attention and learn. And with that, the brain’s surface turned from gray to brown. While retaining their shape, the pearly waves became bristly knolls, and the gelatinous surface was harshened by dust and sagebrush. A gang of buffalo came out from behind the eyes and ambled through the hills.

Now Håkan knew he was dreaming and lost interest. He sank into annihilation.

From In the Distance

edits an academic journal for Columbia University and is the author of Borges, between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury, 2012). His first novel, In the Distance, was a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of 2017 and a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has been published

by The Kenyon Review, Playboy, Granta, and The Paris Review.

HERNAN DIAZ

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Michael R. Jackson

D RAM A

(Blackness. Intermission chimes. Lights on USHER, a black queer man with his back to us ringing chimes from the back of a theater that manifests as a strange loop in his mind, along with silhouettes of his THOUGHTS who stand by facing us, blinking like a cursor.)

#1. INTERMISSION SONG (INTRO)

(THOUGHTS)

USHER

Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your seats; the second act is about to begin!

Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your seats; the second act is about to begin!

It will feature performers running down the aisles and wearing pantaloons and gaudy flowing robes that I think are meant to indicate the wholesome corporate beauty of “Mother Africa!” There will be swinging birds on fishing poles and a black Ken doll with a crossover dialect in a lion costume! What else? Oh, yes!

In the background, there will be a young overweight-to-obese homosexual and/ or gay and/or queer assigned male at birth, cisgender, able-bodied universityand-graduate-school educated, musical theater writing, broke-ass middle-class politically far left-leaning black-identified and classified American descendant of slaves full of self-conscious femme energy who thinks he’s probably a vers bottom but not totally certain of that dressed in an usher uniform! Surrounded by his extremely persistent Thoughts!

#2. (OPENING) 2INTERMISSION SONG

(THOUGHTS, USHER)

THOUGHT #1

How many minutes ‘til the end of intermission?

THOUGHT #2

Is that how the show should open?

THOUGHT #1

Should there even be a show?

THOUGHT #2

No, it should start with what he’s thinking THOUGHTS #1

Which is just a cursor blinking THOUGHTS #1-2

‘Cause of all of the directions that the narrative could go!

USHER

He wants to show what it’s like to live up here and travel the world in a fat, black queer body THOUGHTS #4–6

How many minutes ‘til the end of intermission?

Some say write from exploration Some say just write what you know THOUGHT #5

But either way you keep careening so it’s hard to find the meaning in your— THOUGHT #1

Big, black and queer-ass American Broadway— ALL THOUGHTS

How many minutes ‘til the end of intermission If you can’t please the Caucasians you will never get the dough—

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THOUGHT #1

‘Cause critics clinically deny us THOUGHTS #1-2

They deny implicit bias THOUGHT #6

‘Cause their vanity’s supported THOUGHTS #5–6

By a system that’s distorted THOUGHT #4

But, of course it’s you who’s crazy ALL THOUGHTS

‘Cause you’re just too dumb and lazy and you lack both craft and rigor THOUGHT # 3

‘Cause you’re just a fucking nig—

THOUGHTS #1–2, 4–6

Big, black and queer-ass American Broadway— Big, black and queer-ass American Broadway—

ALL THOUGHTS

Big, black and queer-ass American Broadway ALL THOUGHTS USHER Usher-usher! Usher! Usher!

Usher-usher! Usher! Usher! usher-usher! Usher! Usher! etc.

How many minutes ‘til the end of intermission? etc.

Oh my god oh my god oh my god, etc.

Less than two!!!

From A Strange Loop

holds a BFA and MFA in playwriting and musical theatre writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. As a songwriter, he has seen his work performed everywhere from Joe’s Pub to the National Alliance for Musical Theatre.

He wrote lyrics and co-wrote book for the musical adaptation of the 2007 horror film Teeth with composer and co-bookwriter Anna K. Jacobs. He wrote book, music, and lyrics for the musicals White Girl in Danger and A Strange Loop (which receives its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in co-production with Page 73 productions in May of 2019). He has received a 2017 Jonathan Larson Grant, a 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a 2017 ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a 2016/2017 Dramatist Guild fellowship, and was the 2017 Williamstown Theatre Festival Playwright-in-Residence. He has commissions from Grove Entertainment, Barbara Whitman Productions, and LCT3.

MICHAEL R. JACKSON

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Terese Marie Mailhot

N O N F I CT I O N

My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.

I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. He marked it as solicitation. The man took me shopping with his pity. I was silenced by charity—like so many Indians. I kept my hand out. My story became the hustle.

Women asked me what my endgame was. I hadn’t thought about it. I considered marrying one of the men and sitting with my winnings, but I was too smart to sit. I took their money and went to school. I was hungry and took more. When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much.

The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves. I stopped answering men’s questions or their calls.

Women asked me for my story.

My grandmother told me about Jesus. We knelt to pray. She told me to close my eyes. It was the only thing she asked me to do properly. She had conviction, but she also taught me to be mindless. We

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started receipts and lost track. We forgot ingredients. Our cakes never rose. We started an applehead doll—the shrunken, carved head sat on a bookshelf years after she left.

When she died nobody noticed me. Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.

My mother brought healers to our home and I thought she was trying to exorcise me—a little ghost. Psychics came. Our house was still ruptured. I started to craft ideas. I wrapped myself in a Pendleton blanket and picked blueberries. I pretended I was ancient. A healer looked at me. He was tall and his jeans were dirty.

He knelt down. I thought I was in trouble, so I told him that I had been good. He said, “You don’t need to be nice.”

My mother said that was when I became trouble.

“Turn your shirt backward to confuse the ghosts,” she said, and sent me to bed.

From Heart Berries

graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA in fiction. Mailhot’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Times, Carve Magazine, and elsewhere. The recipient of several fellowships— including the SWAIA Discovery Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Writing by Writers Fellowship, and the Elk Writer’s Workshop Fellowship—she was recently named the Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University and resides in West Lafayette, Indiana. Heart Berries (Counterpoint, 2018), her first book, was a New York Times bestseller.

TERESE MARIE MAILHOT

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Nadia Owusu

N O N F I CT I O N

I was fascinated by place because no place had ever belonged to me, nor had I ever belonged to any place. That was also why, as a child, I was fascinated by the body. Perhaps, I thought, I could just belong inside my own body. Perhaps I could know the streams of the veins in my wrists the way other people knew the streams in which they swam as children. Perhaps I could know the names of all the bones in the back of my hand the way other people knew the names of the backroads that were shortcuts home. I could know the rhythm of my pulse like my friend Dan knew the rhythm of the approaching train in his hometown, the rhythm he woke up to and went to sleep to and hoped would lead him somewhere else someday. Instead, I moved further and further outside of my body. Most of us do. But I moved so far outside that I got lost and couldn’t find my way back in.

What will happen, I wonder now, if I cut myself open? I once dissected a fetal pig. I laughed at its cold rubbery corpse. I laughed as I made the first incision. I don’t know why I laughed.

I snatch small sharp scissors from my desk and press the point of them into my thigh. I cannot bring myself to go deep. I do not laugh.

The earth is reduced to this blue chair island. I rub the soil of my cheek against the soil of the blue upholstery.

Once, I was in an airport somewhere in Africa, waiting for my father to arrive. It could have been Uganda, Ethiopia, or Tanzania. The memory is not a clear one. I so often waited for my father at airports.

This airport had big windows that looked out on the landing strip, so you could watch people get off the plane with their suitcases and their cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Nobody travels light to anywhere in Africa. Tourists carry giant backpacks full of tents and mosquito

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repellent and khaki outfits. Africans carry gifts for everyone they know, and some for strangers. There were no arrival gates. People walked down a ladder and onto the tarmac. They paused and set their luggage down. They took off their sweaters or wiped their glasses. I scanned the crowd for my father, but my eyes landed on a woman with brown skin like mine. She had long cornrows down her back. I noticed her because her pause was longer than everyone else’s. I wondered what she was doing. She got down on her knees and placed her cheek against the tarmac and then kissed it. She stayed there, with her lips pressed to the ground, for a good long time.

“What’s she doing?” I asked Anabel, who was waiting beside me, examining her lipstick in the little mirror on its case.

“Greeting the earth,” Anabel said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She’s probably been away from home for a long time.”

With my cheek against the blue chair, I press my lips against the place in my wrist where my heartbeat whispers. “Hello,” I say. Up close, blue veins look like rivers trapped underground. Borders not yet burst.

From Aftershocks

is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. Simon and Schuster will publish her first book, Aftershocks, in 2020. Her lyric essay chapbook, So Devilish a Fire, is a winner of the The Atlas Review chapbook series and was published in 2018. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Literary Review, Catapult, and others. Nadia grew up in Rome, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kumasi, and London. She is an Associate Director at Living Cities, an economic racial justice organization.

NADIA OWUSU

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Nafissa Thompson-Spires

F I CT I O N

She ran water, testing the temperature with her elbow. She took Ralph from his crib, and he fussed and whimpered for a moment, then looked into her eyes as if to say, “Why did you wake me?”

She attempted to compose a text message in her mind, some sort of explanation or apology, but she couldn’t settle on the right words.

Ralph clapped his hands together before and after she pulled his shirt over his head. She undressed him and then dressed him in a white linen suit she had bought for an upcoming vacation trip. She blessed his forehead with olive oil.

A song came to her, something Terry used to play on his acoustic guitar when she was six or seven. She would get ready for work when she finished with Ralph—she could work on less sleep than this—and tend to the boy in room 47, maybe pray a level three for him and a level two for herself.

When she covered Ralph’s head with the warm water, she reasoned that at least it wasn’t freezing. At least it was shallower than the plunge from the side of a slave ship. At least it was more comfortable than forcing him to float down the Nile in a woven basket. She dunked him once and counted to five. Had there been time for Terry to cry out as the bullets shattered his right leg, his chest? Would she preserve any part of Ralph? Their faces were blurring together. She wept in terror and allayed her guilt by singing soft phrases, “his bones will be unbroken,” “there’ll be no more crying there.” She could do this—eleven, twelve, thirteen. By fourteen, doubt had begun to creep in. Shouldn’t Ralph have a choice, now that he was already here? Who was she to snuff out his life for fear that someone else would? Would Terry want this for his nephew?

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She yanked Ralph from the water, his eyes wide, her count long lost. She feared the damage was already irreparable and listened to his chest. Alma was frantic, but the muscle memory took over, and she began pumping for CPR. What if her baby did not wake up, and even then, would he be vegetative for the rest of his life?

She had only pumped once when Ralph gurgled, spat water, and cried. He was used to barely breathing.

Alma exhaled for the first time in months.

She didn’t know how they would get through the night, let alone years; one or both of them might end up with their heads underwater some other day. For now, she would monitor Ralph and herself, perhaps call Bette. She gently pinched Ralph’s chubby leg. She felt something like sunlight on her neck and torso, saw a hot flash of heaven or hope in that baby’s wet face, and redressed him and herself for bed.

From Heads of the Colored People

NAFISSA THOMPSON-SPIRES earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s “The Organist,” The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and other publications. Her short story “Heads of the Colored People…” won StoryQuarterly’s 2016 Fiction Prize, judged by Mat Johnson. Her writing has received support from Callaloo, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

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Merritt Tierce

F I CT I O N

I never wore makeup in high school so I didn’t know how to do it. But I bought some Maybelline at the drugstore and I spread it on my face. It made me look older and ugly. Even though he ignored me I would wait in the parking lot until I saw his Camaro pull in and then I would time my walk so we reached the employee entrance at the same time. The day I wore the makeup I couldn’t tell he was looking at me because of the sunglasses but he said Come here when we got close to the door.

What is it, I said. I was standing next to him and he had his hand on the door but he took it away from the handle and pulled me to him by my arm. I tripped forward and he shoved me back. I just need to get this shit off your chin, he said. Jesus. He rubbed across my jawline with the heel of his fist and then took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hand on it. He whipped the handkerchief unfolded with a snap and pressed it to my face with his palm. I was humiliated but his hand was on my face and that was the first time he had touched me since that other afternoon. I could feel the warmth of his hand on

40

my whole face and I could smell his aftershave and I put my hand up over his hand, to push his hand into my face harder. He jerked his hand down when I did that. What are you doing you little freak, he said. Go wash your face.

I washed my face in the women’s restroom. We weren’t supposed to use the front-of-house restrooms even before the restaurant was open. I hadn’t broken any rules before that but I didn’t want to use the employee restroom because it was unisex and anyone who came in would see me. When I came out of the restroom there was the pay phone between the women’s and the men’s restrooms and I picked up the receiver and called the baby’s father. We weren’t supposed to use the phone ever. My ear was still wet from washing my face. I called him collect. He answered on the first ring and the operator said Will you accept the charges from Marie Young and he said Yes and then he said Are you okay? And I said Let’s get married.

From Love Me Back

MERRITT TIERCE was born and raised in Texas and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011 and was a 2013 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Author. Her first book, the novel Love Me Back (Doubleday, 2014), was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for debut fiction and won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction. Tierce’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, Southwest Review, and other publications.

Merritt currently writes for the Netflix show Orange Is the New Black. She lives in Los Angeles and is at work on a book of autofiction about men, sex, writing, the internet, depression, being a woman, physicality, and television.

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Vanessa AngĂŠlica Villarreal

P O E T RY

A Field of Onions: Brown Study dedicated to the immigrants buried in mass graves in and near Falfurrias, Texas

1.

I walk through a bald field blooming violet onions. I will know I am absolved when there is no more dirt underfoot, when I have flipped the earth and the river runs above us, a glassed belldark sound.

2.

To find: liver, lung, womb. A lens cut from vulture eye. This is what it is to miss a thing.

3.

At the McDonald’s, a man in a parked car will talk himself awake. This is another kind of hunger.

4.

A prayer for the king: forty pears, all bloomed from young throats. Long life, a sea of rice, a thicket of braids.

5.

Problem: Four boats arranged in a cross drift away from each other in opposing directions. What theory states that, all conditions remaining equal, they can reach each other again on the other side of a perfect globe?

6.

To understand a map is to shrink the world; to plan; to color.

7.

Can you smell the vinegar blood in the babes, stardappled. The survivors ride the beast train toward the North, over those rolled off onto the tracks.

See their legs, scattered.

8.

Olga in Minnesota: to be with her mother amidst rags of spring snow.

For now, she is curled in the glovebox of a Chevrolet Cavalier.

9.

Bless you, all that meat and milk, threaded. Pass, you fairer animal.

Not you. I have seen the door in the water.

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10. Solution: Magical thinking.

11. To panic is to feel all your wildness at once.

12. A flock of geese felled to the open plain, the lush grass confounds even the birds for passable angles.

13. We the holy, are never really still. Agitation pulls even at hanging planets.

14. Four sirens twist their voices—four dead in the desert borderlands.

15. In this dream, I am on a plane. I wake up to the pilot smiling down on me. No one flies the plane. Or, I am flying the plane.

16. The threads fly loose on each body, some sown to others, some not. But let’s not take this metaphor too far; we are better than the obvious.

17. A hero is a plane of being.

18. I think of a girl at space camp, perched above a better telescope than she has in her room. Tonight, she figures space as a map of horses.

Blur, focus. Blur and focus. Tonight, the clouds will pull apart for her.

Tonight, we will all dream of horses.

19. My ancestor says: Later, when I arrive at your house, I will hang a crown of flowers at your door. And yours. And yours.

20. And: Sometimes I choose to come through your television. In sleep, you will mistake me for dripping water. You will think you heard your father. We visit each other in these ways.

21. Plan B. From the moon, the earth is a crown of dark marble.

22. There are varying kinds of tragedy that produce the same outcome: paperwork.

23. And even if we did save the trees, or the whales, the hunger would still be so great the people who need saving would still need saving.

24. The heads of violet onions, rooted child fingers, blue-leafed lips.

An orchard, a mass grave.

25. I give you my coat and scarf in offering. I have no choice, I was born to saints in pilgrimage.

26. Paper-purple skin. Grounded bodies. The border. A field of onions.

27. Thesis: I swallow a bee for each ill deed done. I am a hive walking.

I strain to hear you over the regret.

VANESSA ANGÉLICA VILLARREAL was born in the Rio Grande Valley. She is the author of the collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Boston Review, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and is pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

46

Lauren Yee

D RAM A

Setting: S21 Prison, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 1978. The height of the Khmer Rouge’s takeover.

CHUM

DUCH

THAT’S why i’m here? you’re going to kill me over that? what i wrote down on a piece of paper?!

luckily, that is never the case.

DUCH

i’m going to get someone to do it for me, but yes.

CHUM

you don’t even know what that is.

DUCH

CIA code, obviously.

CHUM

but if brother number one wants to know what it means? what will you tell him? how will you explain it?

DUCH

it’s a message. to your operatives, that’s what it is.

CHUM

but what if you’re wrong?

DUCH

what what what?

CHUM

(deliberate) what if you’re wrong.

CHUM

except this time you are. you kill me now, you will never know the answer. and then what will brother number one think of your excellent investigative work, comrade duch?

DUCH

well?

CHUM

they’re lyrics. to a song.

(DUCH looks down at the piece of paper) DUCH

it doesn’t even rhyme.

CHUM

it does in english.

DUCH

and where did you get it from?

CHUM

i wrote it down from memory.

DUCH

because you’re a spy.

CHUM

CHUM

because i’m a musician. my band and i used to play this song all the time. it’s a very popular song.

this is a stratocaster.

DUCH

then why don’t i know it?

CHUM

you will, once i play it.

DUCH

so. let’s hear it. this “song,” these “lyrics.”

CHUM

i need an instrument first.

DUCH

you’re stalling.

CHUM

find me an instrument and we’ll do it later.

DUCH

you mean tomorrow.

CHUM

i just want you to hear how it’s supposed to be played. so you know the absolute truth.

(DUCH goes to the box of torture instruments, pulls out an electric guitar. he hands it to him)

DUCH

yes.

CHUM

where did you get this from?

DUCH

i have a way of making things appear and disappear.

(DUCH plugs the electric guitar into the wall. CHUM plays a note) CHUM

i usually play bass.

DUCH

if you can play bass, you can play guitar.

CHUM

how do you know that?

DUCH

i tend to know everything. now impress me.

CHUM

iiii DUCH

yes?

48

i don’t know if i remember how it goes.

for the first time in days weeks years, i am asleep.

DUCH

(DUCH drifts off to sleep)

CHUM

up to you.

DUCH

(CHUM closes his eyes, listens to something inside of him. he plays. SONG: “TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING’”)

and i am transported to a place where i am just an innocent bystander.

(to audience) okay. fine. it wasn’t electric. but hey, you know what? maybe it was! maybe i did plug it in. maybe dylan really did go electric in cambodia. you don’t know. this is my story, i could tell you anything i want.

DUCH

DUCH

isn’t that strange? while you are here in this space i can tell you anything and you will believe it. because whoever tells the story tells the truth. because if a tree falls in a forest and that forest is a communist dictatorship and the dictator has ordered you to cut down all the trees to make way for the forest you’re supposed to be planting, then who’s to say what did or didn’t happen! but what is for certain: that night

(CHUM finishes his song) and the next morning, i kill him.

(CHUM looks at DUCH , waits) DUCH

i try to. i should. i mean, the capitalist. the westerner. the master of sleep. but i forget. yes, that’s it. i plan to kill him, but you know what? every night, i forget. about pol pot. about central committee. about every single thing breathing down my neck. so every night one more night.

CHUM

what do you want to hear tomorrow?

DUCH

and i write down on the back of his photo: “keep for use.”

CHUM

CHUM

“keep for use.”

i never really thought about it.

DUCH

DUCH

“for now.”

you sang it all the time.

CHUM

CHUM

“for now.”

i never chose the songs we played.

(CHUM back on his guitar as DUCH listens. DUCH looks at the piece of paper)

DUCH

DUCH

CHUM

what does it mean?

i was just the bassist. it wasn’t my place to decide.

CHUM

they’re lyrics DUCH

you were a member of the band.

DUCH

you were just following orders.

but the message of it.

From Cambodian Rock Band

is a playwright born and raised in San Francisco. She lives in New York City. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and her MFA in playwriting from UCSD. Lauren’s work includes King of the Yees, The Great Leap, Cambodian Rock Band, Ching Chong Chinaman, The Hatmaker’s Wife, and others. She has been a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a MAP Fund grantee. She is the winner of the Kesselring Prize and the Francesca Primus Prize. She has been a finalist for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the ATCA/Steinberg Award, and others. The Hatmaker’s Wife was an Outer Critics Circle nominee for the John Gassner Award for best play by a new American playwright. Lauren is a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab, a 2018/2019 Hodder fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and a New Dramatists playwright.

LAUREN YEE

50

The Winners of the Whiting Award 1985–2019

Raymond Abbott, Fiction, 1985

Alexander Chee, Fiction, 2003

André Aciman, Fiction, 1995

Dan Chiasson, Poetry, 2004

David Adjmi, Drama, 2010

Don Mee Choi, Poetry, 2011

Ellen Akins, Fiction, 1989

Paul Clemens, Nonfiction, 2011

Daniel Alarcón, Fiction, 2004

Robert Cohen, Fiction, 2000

Jeffery Renard Allen, Fiction, Poetry, 2002

Christopher Cokinos, Nonfiction, 2003

Mindy Aloff, Nonfiction, 1987

Clarence Coo, Drama, 2017

Elizabeth Arnold, Poetry, 2002

Amanda Coplin, Fiction, 2013

John Ash, Poetry, 1986

Leopoldine Core, Fiction, 2015

Kirsten Bakis, Fiction, 2004

Eduardo C. Corral, Poetry, 2011

Catherine Barnett, Poetry, 2004

Patty Yumi Cottrell, Fiction, 2018

Clare Barron, Drama, 2017

Mark Cox, Poetry, 1987

Elif Batuman, Nonfiction, 2010

Douglas Crase, Poetry, 1985

Jen Beagin, Fiction, 2017

Justin Cronin, Fiction, 2002

Jo Ann Beard, Nonfiction, 1997

Stanley Crouch, Nonfiction, 1991

Mischa Berlinski, Fiction, 2008

Michael Cunningham, Fiction, 1995

Ciaran Berry, Poetry, 2012

Michael Dahlie, Fiction, 2010

Sherwin Bitsui, Poetry, 2006

Charles D’Ambrosio, Fiction, 2006

Scott Blackwood, Fiction, 2011

J. D. Daniels, Nonfiction, 2016

Brian Blanchfield, Nonfiction, 2016

Lydia Davis, Fiction, 1988

Judy Blunt, Nonfiction, 2001

Nathan Alan Davis, Drama, 2018

Anne Boyer, Poetry and Nonfiction, 2018

Tyree Daye, Poetry, 2019

Courtney A. Brkic, Fiction, 2003

Connie Deanovich, Poetry, 1997

Joel Brouwer, Poetry, 2001

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Fiction,

Jericho Brown, Poetry, 2009

Nonfiction, 2013

Michael Burkard, Poetry, 1988

Hernan Diaz, Fiction, 2019

Michael Byers, Fiction, 1998

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Poetry, 2016

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Fiction, 2005

Trudy Dittmar, Nonfiction, 2003

Ryan Call, Fiction, 2011

Matt Donovan, Poetry, 2010

Sheila Callaghan, Drama, 2007

Mark Doty, Poetry, 1994

Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Poetry, 2019

Jennifer Dubois, Fiction, 2013

Francisco Cantú, Nonfiction, 2017

Bruce Duffy, Fiction, 1988

Anthony Carelli, Poetry, 2015

Pam Durban, Fiction, 1987

Hayden Carruth, Poetry, 1986

Stuart Dybek, Fiction, 1985

Emily Carter, Fiction, 2001

Gerald Early, Nonfiction, 1988

Joan Chase, Fiction, 1987

Russell Edson, Poetry, 1989

52

Kim Edwards, Fiction, 2002

Rinne Groff, Drama, 2005

Louis Edwards, Fiction, 1994

Paul Guest, Poetry, 2007

Erik Ehn, Drama, 1997

Stephen Adly Guirgis, Drama, 2006

Gretel Ehrlich, Nonfiction, 1987

Danai Gurira, Drama, 2012

Nancy Eimers, Poetry, 1998

Daniel Hall, Poetry, 1998

Deborah Eisenberg, Fiction, 1987

Lisa Halliday, Fiction, 2017

Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry, 2005

W. David Hancock, Drama, 1998

Jeffrey Eugenides, Fiction, 1993

Kent Haruf, Fiction, 1986

Roger Fanning, Poetry, 1992

Michael Haskell, Poetry, 1999

Anderson Ferrell, Fiction, 1996

Ehud Havazelet, Fiction, 1999

Kathleen Finneran, Nonfiction, 2001

Terrance Hayes, Poetry, 1999

Ben Fountain, Fiction, 2007

Alan Heathcock, Fiction, 2012

Jonathan Franzen, Fiction, 1988

Amy Herzog, Drama, 2011

Kennedy Fraser, Nonfiction, 1994

Emily Hiestand, Poetry, 1990

Ian Frazier, Nonfiction, 1989

Rick Hilles, Poetry, 2008

Nell Freudenberger, Fiction, 2005

Lucas Hnath, Drama, 2015

Forrest Gander, Poetry, 1997

Eva Hoffman, Nonfiction, 1992

Cristina García, Fiction, 1996

Donovan Hohn, Nonfiction, 2008

Madeleine George, Drama, 2016

John Holman, Fiction, 1991

David Gewanter, Poetry, 2002

Mary Hood, Fiction, 1994

Melissa James Gibson, Drama, 2002

Jay Hopler, Poetry, 2009

Dagoberto Gilb, Fiction, 1993

Michelle Huneven, Fiction, 2002

Samantha Gillison, Fiction, 2000

Samuel D. Hunter, Drama, 2012

Aracelis Girmay, Poetry, 2015

Ishion Hutchinson, Poetry, 2013

Jody Gladding, Poetry, 1997

Naomi Iizuka, Drama, 1999

Allison Glock, Nonfiction, 2004

James Ijames, Drama, 2017

Molly Gloss, Fiction, 1996

Major Jackson, Poetry, 2003

Rebecca Goldstein, Fiction, 1991

Michael R. Jackson, Drama, 2019

Allegra Goodman, Fiction, 1991

Mitchell S. Jackson, Fiction, 2016

Jorie Graham, Poetry, 1985

Tyehimba Jess, Poetry, 2006

Lucy Grealy, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1995

Adam Johnson, Fiction, 2009

Kaitlyn Greenidge, Fiction, 2017

Denis Johnson, Fiction, 1986

Elana Greenfield, Drama, Fiction, 2004

Jenny Johnson, Poetry, 2015

Linda Gregg, Poetry, 1985

R. S. Jones, Fiction, 1992

Gordon Grice, Nonfiction, 1999

A. Van Jordan, Poetry, 2004

Virginia Grise, Drama, 2013

Dan Josefson, Fiction, 2015

Rajiv Joseph, Drama, 2009

Ralph Lombreglia, Fiction,

Hansol Jung, Drama, 2018

Nonfiction, 1998

Cynthia Kadohata, Fiction, 1991

Layli Long Soldier, Poetry, 2016

Agymah Kamau, Fiction, 2003

Nathaniel Mackey, Fiction, Poetry, 1993

Ilya Kaminsky, Poetry, 2005

Rosemary Mahoney, Nonfiction, 1994

Joan Kane, Poetry, 2009

Terese Marie Mailhot, Nonfiction, 2019

Seth Kantner, Fiction, 2005

Mona Mansour, Drama, 2012

Mary Karr, Poetry, 1989

Micheline A. Marcom, Fiction, 2006

Douglas Kearney, Poetry, 2008

Ben Marcus, Fiction, 1999

John Keene, Fiction, Poetry, 2005

J. S. Marcus, Fiction, 1992

Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Poetry, 1996

Anthony Marra, Fiction, 2012

Randall Kenan, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1994

Dionisio D. Martínez, Poetry, 1993

Brad Kessler, Fiction, 2007

Nina Marie Martínez, Fiction, 2006

Laleh Khadivi, Fiction, 2008

Cate Marvin, Poetry, 2007

Alice Sola Kim, Fiction, 2016

Shane McCrae, Poetry, 2011

Suji Kwock Kim, Poetry, 2006

Tarell Alvin McCraney, Drama, 2007

James Kimbrell, Poetry, 1998

Alice McDermott, Fiction, 1987

Lily King, Fiction, 2000

Reginald McKnight, Fiction, 1995

Brian Kiteley, Fiction, 1996

John McManus, Fiction, 2000

Matthew Klam, Fiction, 2001

James McMichael, Poetry, 1995

Kevin Kling, Drama, 1993

Scott McPherson, Drama, 1991

Wayne Koestenbaum, Nonfiction,

Jane Mead, Poetry, 1992

Poetry, 1994

Suketu Mehta, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1997

Tony Kushner, Drama, 1990

Morgan Meis, Nonfiction, 2013

Natalie Kusz, Nonfiction, 1989

Ellen Meloy, Nonfiction, 1997

Catherine Lacey, Fiction, 2016

Michael Meyer, Nonfiction, 2009

Mary La Chapelle, Fiction, 1988

Meg Miroshnik, Drama, 2012

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Fiction, 2010

Albert Mobilio, Fiction, Poetry, 2000

Rickey Laurentiis, Poetry, 2018

C. E. Morgan, Fiction, 2013

Victor Lavalle, Fiction, 2004

Wright Morris, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985

Amy Leach, Nonfiction, 2010

Sylvia Moss, Poetry, 1988

Li-Young Lee, Poetry, 1988

Thylias Moss, Poetry, 1991

Suzannah Lessard, Nonfiction, 1995

Brighde Mullins, Drama, 2001

Dana Levin, Poetry, 2005

Nami Mun, Fiction, 2009

Mark Levine, Poetry, 1993

Manuel Muñoz, Fiction, 2008

Yiyun Li, Fiction, 2006

Yannick Murphy, Fiction, 1990

54

Yxta Maya Murray, Fiction, 1999

Spencer Reece, Poetry, 2005

Lawrence Naumoff, Fiction, 1990

Roger Reeves, Poetry, 2015

Howard Norman, Fiction, 1985

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Nonfiction, 2012

Bruce Norris, Drama, 2006

Mark Richard, Fiction, 1990

Josip Novakovich, Fiction, Nonfiction,

Atsuro Riley, Poetry, 2012

1997

Harriet Ritvo, Nonfiction, 1990

Sigrid Nunez, Fiction, 1993

José Rivera, Drama, 1992

Dennis Nurkse, Poetry, 1990

Lewis Robinson, Fiction, 2003

Antoinette Nwandu, Drama, 2018

James Robison, Fiction, 1985

Geoffrey O’Brien, Nonfiction, 1988

Rick Rofihe, Fiction, 1991

Chris Offutt, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1996

Carlo Rotella, Nonfiction, 2007

Patrick O’Keeffe, Fiction, 2006

Jess Row, Fiction, 2003

Dael Orlandersmith, Drama, 2008

Mary Ruefle, Poetry, 1995

Daniel Orozco, Fiction, 2011

Sarah Ruhl, Drama, 2003

Nadia Owusu, Nonfiction, 2019

Michael Ryan, Poetry, 1987

ZZ Packer, Fiction, 1999

Russ Rymer, Nonfiction, 1995

Ann Pancake, Fiction, 2003

Luc Sante, Nonfiction, 1989

Suzan-Lori Parks, Drama, 1992

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nonfiction, 2010

Elena Passarello, Nonfiction, 2015

James Schuyler, Poetry, 1985

Lydia Peelle, Fiction, 2010

Salvatore Scibona, Fiction, 2009

Janet Peery, Fiction, 1993

Danzy Senna, Fiction, 2002

Kathleen Peirce, Poetry, 1993

Anton Shammas, Fiction,

Benjamin Percy, Fiction, 2008

Nonfiction, 1991

Andrew X. Pham, Nonfiction, 2000

Akhil Sharma, Fiction, 2001

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Poetry, 2013

Lisa Shea, Fiction, 1993

Tommy Pico, Poetry, 2018

Julie Sheehan, Poetry, 2008

Claudia Roth Pierpont, Nonfiction, 1994

Mona Simpson, Fiction, 1986

Darryl Pinckney, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1986

Safiya Sinclair, Poetry, 2016

Katha Pollitt, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1992

Evan Smith, Drama, 2002

Reinaldo Povod, Drama, 1987

Tracy K. Smith, Poetry, 2005

Padgett Powell, Fiction, 1986

Dalia Sofer, Fiction, 2007

Stephanie Powell Watts, Fiction, 2013

Jason Sommer, Poetry, 2001

Brontez Purnell, Fiction, 2018

Elizabeth Spires, Poetry, 1996

Hanna Pylväinen, Fiction, 2012

Jane Springer, Poetry, 2010

Hugh Raffles, Nonfiction, 2009

Matthew Stadler, Fiction, 1995

Keith Reddin, Drama, 1992

James Thomas Stevens, Poetry, 2000

Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Fiction, 2019

Joshua Weiner, Poetry, 2002

Merritt Tierce, Fiction, 2019

Timberlake Wertenbaker, Drama, 1989

Frank Stewart, Poetry, 1986

Kate Wheeler, Fiction, 1994

Ruth Stone, Poetry, 1986

Simone White, Poetry, 2017

Patricia Storace, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1996

Colson Whitehead, Fiction, 2000

Kelly Stuart, Drama, 2000

Marianne Wiggins, Fiction, 1989

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Nonfiction, 2004

Amy Wilentz, Nonfiction, 1990

Melanie Sumner, Fiction, 1995

Damien Wilkins, Fiction, 1992

Mary Swander, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1994

Claude Wilkinson, Poetry, 2000

Margaret Talbot, Nonfiction, 1999

Phillip B. Williams, Poetry, 2017

Lysley Tenorio, Fiction, 2008

Greg Williamson, Poetry, 1998

Clifford Thompson, Nonfiction, 2013

August Wilson, Drama, 1986

LB Thompson, Poetry, 2010

Tracey Scott Wilson, Drama, 2004

Melanie Rae Thon, Fiction, 1997

Tobias Wolff, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1989

Christopher Tilghman, Fiction, 1990

John Wray, Fiction, 2001

Peter Trachtenberg, Nonfiction, 2007

Austin Wright, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985

Vu Tran, Fiction, 2009

C. D. Wright, Poetry, 1989

Judy Troy, Fiction, 1996

Franz Wright, Poetry, 1991

Tony Tulathimutte, Fiction, 2017

Stephen Wright, Fiction, 1990

Jack Turner, Nonfiction, 2007

Lauren Yee, Drama, 2019

Mark Turpin, Poetry, 1997

Martha Zweig, Poetry, 1999

Samrat Upadhyay, Fiction, 2001 Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Fiction, 2015 A. J. Verdelle, Fiction, 1996 Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Poetry, 2019 William T. Vollmann, Fiction, 1988 Ocean Vuong, Poetry, 2016 D. J. Waldie, Nonfiction, 1998 David Foster Wallace, Fiction, 1987 Anthony Walton, Nonfiction, 1998 Esmé Weijun Wang, Nonfiction, 2018 Weike Wang, Fiction, 2018 Anne Washburn, Drama, 2015 Teddy Wayne, Fiction, 2011 Charles Harper Webb, Poetry, 1998 Kerri Webster, Poetry, 2011

No award was granted in 2014.

PER MISSIO NS

Introduction copyright © 2019 by Mary Karr.

Excerpt from What Runs Over by Kayleb Rae Candrilli. Copyright © 2019 by Kayleb Rae Candrilli. Published by YesYes Books in 2017. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from River Hymns by Tyree Daye. Copyright © 2019 by Tyree Daye.

Published by American Poetry Review in 2017. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from In the Distance by Hernan Diaz. Copyright © 2019 by Hernan Diaz.

Published by Coffee House Press in 2017. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson. Copyright © 2019 by Michael R. Jackson. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. Copyright © 2019 by Terese Marie Mailhot. Published by Counterpoint in 2018. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2020 by Nadia Owusu. From the forthcoming book Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu, to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

Copyright © 2018 by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

Excerpt from Love Me Back: A Novel by Merritt Tierce, copyright © 2014 by Merritt Tierce. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Copyright © 2019

by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Published by Noemi Press in 2017.

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