The 2020 Whiting Awards

The Ten Winners of the 2020 Whiting Awards

Aria Aber POETRY Diannely Antigua POETRY Will Arbery DRAMA Jaquira Díaz NONFICTION Andrea Lawlor FICTION Ling Ma FICTION Jake Skeets POETRY Genevieve Sly Crane FICTION Jia Tolentino NONFICTION Genya Turovskaya POETRY

INTRODUCTION BY

Esmé Weijun Wang

Whiting Awards

INTRODUCTION BY

Aracelis Girmay

ABOUT THE WHITING FOUNDATION AND AWARD INTRODUCTION BY ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG

Aria Aber Diannely Antigua Will Arbery Jaquira Díaz Andrea Lawlor Ling Ma Jake Skeets Genevieve Sly Crane Jia Tolentino Genya Turovskaya THE WINNERS OF THE WHITING AWARD, 1985–2020

5 6 10 14 18 22 26 30 34 38 42 46 50

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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AB OU T T H E

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 comprised of a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors appointed every year by the Foundation. By tradition, nominators and selectors serve anonymously to allow them complete freedom in choosing the strongest candidates. Whiting winners have gone on to receive numerous prestigious fellowships and other awards, and their work has shaped and advanced literature in this country over the past three decades.

The Foundation’s other programs in support of literature include the Creative Nonfiction Grant to enable 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 Fellowship, for faculty who are undertaking 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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I N T R OD U CT IO N BY

Esmé Weijun Wang

is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays and The Border of Paradise: A Novel. She received the Whiting Award for Nonfiction in 2018 and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in San Francisco, where she is working on her second novel.

ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG

I was a magician’s assistant in the early 1990s. The magician, named Cameron, thought himself a David-Copperfield-in-training. For the grand finale of his act, he was chained up in a trunk while I climbed atop it with a velvet throw to exchange places with him at a toss of the cloth. Because I’d signed a nondisclosure agreement, I never told my family how the trick was achieved, though they harassed me for years to confess.

Done well, writing is one of the most genuinely mysterious things that we will ever do. If we are lucky, we will take amorphous and confusing aspects of our lives and of our imaginations, and we will commit them to paper with enough nuance to transmit them into the minds of others. In this way, writing is like telepathy, or the genuine iteration of a magic trick, except that it is I who have seemingly pulled a card at random, and you, the viewer, who will tell me what I’ve drawn.

So often writers are asked, at readings and in interviews, why it is that we write. Flannery O’Connor famously said that she did it because she was good at it. I suspect that Joyce Carol Oates just can’t stop. I write in large part because I experience unusual mental states and hope to convey them to readers who have never experienced psychosis or PTSD. I write to tell the stories of my parents, who became foreigners in a country they never felt comfortable in for the children they did not yet have. I write because to make connections between ideas in my nonfiction, or to find my way to a new scene from a stuck place in my fiction, is pure magic, and because I love to surprise myself and to share that surprise.

The last four years, post-2016 election, have been increasingly frightening to marginalized communities, who have found our already fragile rights eroding. So many of us have turned to one another with question marks in our faces: what do we do now? How do we continue to write? Is writing even important in times like these, when the climate crisis is upon us, and hatred seems to have such intense power?

To me, the answer is: yes, and perhaps more than ever. I am dazed by and grateful for the winners within this chapbook. Their writing, I believe, is indestructible in a way that an illusion can never be— because its power does not hinge upon a single secret. Instead of falling apart under scrutiny, the work blossoms. We marvel at the beauty of it, the clarity and the miracle of it. These thoughts and images open up the world.

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The Ten Winners of the

2020 Whiting Awards

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Aria Aber

PO ET RY

“Afghan Funeral in Paris”

The aunts here clink Malbec glasses and parade their grief with musky, expensive scents that whisper in elevators and hallways.

Each natural passing articulates the unnatural: every aunt has a son who fell, or a daughter who hid in rubble for two years, until that knock of officers holding a bin bag filled with a dress and bones. But what do I know?

I get pedicures and eat madeleines while reading Swann’s Way. When I tell one aunt I’d like to go back, she screams It is not yours to want.

Have some cream cheese with that, says another.

Oh, what wonder to be alive and see my father’s footprints in his sister’s garden.

He’s furiously scissoring the hyacinths, saying All the time when the tele-researcher asks him How often do you think your life is a mistake? During the procession, the aunts’ wails vibrate: wires full of crows in heavy wind.

I hate every plumed minute of it. God invented everything out of nothing, but the nothing shines through, said Paul Valéry. Paris never charmed me, but when some stranger asks if it stinks in Afghanistan, I am so shocked that I hug him. And he lets me, his ankles briefly brushing against mine.

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“Operation Cyclone, Years Later”

For all I know, God could be, after all, favoring a mountain boy brown with dust, his brow calloused from the memory of men he’s stoned to death, pissed on the corpse of. He is a student.

He has seen, so has been ruined; each eyeball astonished with what has shot through its pupil: a body will morph, in fall, into its surrounding—even dam. Even stone. We are what we are taught, yes, but also what we hope for. I hope for more than a war that whittles us to chameleons or refrigerated paper tags hanging from ankles. It is so certain, where we’ll end, yet arbitrary are the words determining the trajectory of our journeys; a name, too, is a gene

and may flourish or impugn the chromosome. Students hope to be cradled by mothers—hope for lunch, an hour to play ball. Students rock back and forth, warmed by the water of prophecy. A lie, if repeated ad nauseam, eventually becomes a prayer. And a cyclone is not a cyclops although it too has an eye— it can see. But would it testify?

If the myths are right, the student gathers, then science is right, and the god particle isn’t, in the end, meant to be kind to us. Still, the student imagines God as moving, colorful shapes. He hums before pulling the firing pin, singing I am a student, I am a student, I am a student of God, and he is right, for that he is, and the rotten field we have scythed of this country is his school.

ARIA ABER was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage won the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, New Republic, and elsewhere.

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Diannely Antigua

PO ET RY

“Praise to the Boys”

On Thursdays the boys played basketball in the church parking lot

while Sister Priscilla taught the girls to sew on buttons, stitch hems, iron collars.

She’d lean her rigid body to guide my hands at the machine, her cabbage breath

lingering as she walked to the next girl.

God lingered too. God watched

my hands feed the needle blue cloth bits at a time. He watched my mouth, knew where I’d put it next, on the end

of a thread before pulling it through the eye.

Sometimes I’d imagine hemming my uniform

above my knee. Sometimes I’d fake a migraine so I could watch from the attic, the boys

with sleeves to their elbows, maybe just down to a t-shirt. I’d watch

their bodies sweat in ways I’d only seen at the altar to a song I was singing, my voice inducing

a twitch of limbs, a wag of tongue in something we weren’t meant to understand.

But God understood. He watched one of those boys sell drugs at gunpoint,

watched one marry my sister, then another kiss a baby’s toes. Three years later

I’d touch the sweat of one, in the backseat of a Dodge Ram van, windows tinted, skirt

pulled up to my waist. God saw the boy lick a silent prayer, saw my back

curve in exalt.

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“Diary Entry #1: Testimony”

I hope no one reads this— I was pregnant in the purple dress

when I escaped from the house.

I was going camping, I was going to Canada. I was

missing a girl who was not a bride.

And I’m still searching for

the face. There was a surgery, a bald head and a grieving. Tomorrow

I will apologize about that burst, my ugly ghost.

I’ll feel guilty for two people. I’ll go to the bathroom to get married

and dream of a driveway. In the dream, I’ll feel the kiss. It’s the year 2000

and I did all my homework. The pastor suspects nothing. I am 12.

We play the weird game.

And that’s not the end.

is a Dominican American poet, born and raised in Massachusetts. Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and received her MFA at NYU. She is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, and the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program. Her work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems can be found in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere.

DIANNELY ANTIGUA

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Will Arbery

DRAM A

JUSTIN

I wanted to say something about the liberal… The nice young liberal people. And the system.

TERESA

Okay what.

JUSTIN

So these nice young liberal people are blinded by a system that distracts them from true moral questions and re-focuses their attention onto fashionable and facile questions of identity and choice, which gender do you want to be today?, how much sex can you have today?, how many babies do you want? and how do you want them to look?, which is really all part of a larger ideological system that is rooted in an evil, early 20th-century quote unquote progressive trend towards quote unquote perfection, eugenics, and crypto-racism, endorsed by Margaret Sanger, an American eugenics system which persists, which wants to eliminate anything unclean or imperfect, including black babies and Down syndrome babies, and create a

sterilized world based around state-mandated pleasure and narcissism. These are just facts, look it up y’all.

I can honestly say that, having lived in that world, and being a 38 year-old nomad, I can guarantee that 99% of them are willing to just be led blindly into the cave, hooked up to a heroin drip of self-satisfied digital activism and committing vile acts of self-gratification because they’re told that it’s important to “experience” life, when actually they’re numbing themselves to the possibility of real sacrifice or any chance of an ethical life, rooted in the grit and toil of suffering in the name of Christ.

And: there are more of them.

We lost the popular vote, by a lot.

Despite the indulgences afforded us by our wealthy backers and our electoral loopholes, we lack a unified youth movement. And they have that. And they’re mobilizing. In many ways, they are in power. And they’re trying to wipe us out. They’re wishing for our death. And the only way to survive is to block them out, to focus on the Lord. Try to

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outlive them. Bake bread, make wine, work the earth, shelter wanderers, and survive.

KEVIN

But the thing I was born in 1989 I’m supposed to be a hero

TERESA

You talk like they’re In Power.

But they’re not in power. We are.

JUSTIN

TERESA

Well it’s an archetype. Not everyone is a hero. It’s just an archetype – a collective thing.

Maybe for now— KEVIN TERESA

No, and there are more of us, too. There are. We just aren’t as loud, and we don’t have control of the media. And we need to come together to fight, not to bake bread. It’s honestly baffling to me that someone as strong as you would already be giving up the fight when it’s barely begun— KEVIN

Teresa Teresa TERESA

What KEVIN

I don’t feel like a hero TERESA

Okay

But I could be a hero. If I learned how to shoot a gun… I was always afraid of holding one cuz I thought I’d just stare into the barrel and pull the trigger.

EMILY

Kevin…

KEVIN

Haha sorry, but if there’s a war coming, then uh I can be part of the heroes! I’ll definitely die I’ll definitely die. But I’ll die with the heroes. You guys, Teresa is saying we’re heroes! Let’s be heroes! Come on let’s be heroes.

And hahaha okay here’s my thing: if there’s a war coming then why is Catholicism all about sex, seriously why is Catholicism OBSESSED with telling me not to

have sex because all that led to is that I have an addiction to the internet and it’s like I’m combing through it like a unholy un-Bible that keeps dissolving toxins into my eyes and all I ever think about is what to do with this goddamn thing between my legs— JUSTIN

Kevin, can you stop.

KEVIN

Why JUSTIN

You’re scaring everyone.

KEVIN

Okay I didn’t mean to scare everyone, I thought I was riffing— Was that not funny?

From Heroes of the Fourth Turning

WILL ARBERY is a playwright from Texas + Wyoming + seven sisters. His plays include Heroes of the Fourth Turning (Playwrights Horizons), Plano (Clubbed Thumb), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (New Neighborhood), and Wheelchair (3 Hole Press). He’s a member of New Dramatists, and an alum of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, P73’s Interstate 73, Colt Coeur, Youngblood, and Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group. He’s currently the Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Playwrights Horizons, where he is also under commission. His plays have received additional support from NYTW, The Vineyard, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Cape Cod Theater Project, The New Group, The Bushwick Starr, Alliance/Kendeda, and Tofte Lake Center. Dance work: Pioneer Works, MCA Chicago, Watermill Center. MFA: Northwestern.

BA: Kenyon College. willarbery.com

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Jaquira Díaz

N O N FICT IO N

As Papi tried to carry Mami toward our front door, she slid down and got loose, and all the street kids exploded, Pito and Anthony and Eggy calling out, “Light her up! Knock her out! Préndela!” It was the same kind of shouting we heard in our living room during boxing matches, my father and his friends knocking back Medallas in front of the TV, everybody jumping to their feet when Macho Camacho started wailing on José Luis Ramírez, hollering, Knock him out! Light him up! Préndelo!

My mother tangled her hands in la vecina’s hair, pulled her down out of Gigante’s arms and onto the ground, and started kicking. My father got a hold of Mami again, picked her up in the air, my mother redfaced and shrieking, spit flying out of her mouth. He carried her inside.

Gigante helped la vecina get up. She had three long, bloody scratches over her nose and mouth, like claw marks.

Just then, as la vecina was getting to her feet, Mami burst through the front door, a steak knife in her hand. The crowd moved back, opening up more space between themselves and my mother, and everything seemed to slow down, Pito and Anthony and Eggy, all of them, disappearing until it was just me and my mother and my mother’s knife, the three of us echoing through the years, propelled forward in time. And because I am my mother’s daughter more than I have ever been my father’s, it will be this moment I think of when I’m a fourteen-yearold hoodlum tucking razorblades into the sides of my Jordans, brass knuckles and Master combination locks and pocketknives in my backpack, when I am fifteen and getting jumped by five girls at the bus stop, when I am sixteen and trying to decide how to deal with a friend who has betrayed me, when I am seventeen and fighting with my brother.

How I would always come back to this, my mother and her knife and all that rage, la vecina leaping back out of her way. And then my father, my father’s face, my father’s hands, my father’s voice, Jeannette, let go of the knife, how he took both of her hands into his, saying it over and over, Suelta el cuchillo, suelta el cuchillo, suelta el cuchillo.

But my mother would not let it go. Instead, Papi lifted her hands above her head, trying to pry it from her fingers, and Mami bit his

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shoulder, kicked him. He leaned her up against the doorway, pressing his body against hers until she couldn’t move, subduing her, and when he was finally able to get the knife, some of the onlookers rushed to help. It took three grown men to get Mami, kicking and slapping and hurling insults at them, back inside our apartment.

Outside, as the crowd split—while la vecina was still fixing her hair and clothes, limping around looking for her chancletas—I saw Jesenia.

She saw me, too. Standing on the front lawn, outside the crowd’s perimeter, Jesenia in one of her Jesenia dresses, a white one with big yellow flowers, her hair parted down the middle, braided. How she stood there, alone, her face stained with tears, how nobody else seemed to see her, how nobody stopped as they headed back to their apartments or the basketball courts or la plaza, how nobody asked if she was okay, if she needed help, anything. I’d like to say that when I saw her, Jesenia looking back at me, yellow ribbons in her hair, that we had a moment. That as we looked into each other’s eyes, we both understood that we had been lost, that we had been lucky to find each other in a crowd, and we both thought, Here is a girl who sees me. Here is a girl who understands.

The truth is we did have a moment, Jesenia and I, seeing each other, knowing each other, and it was clear: We were the same. I hated her and she hated me. Because we were our mothers’ daughters. Because we could not turn back time to the days when our mothers were just girls, or forward, when we would finally break free of them. Because back then we could not see what either of us would become.

From Ordinary Girls

is the author of Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, a Summer/Fall 2019 Indies Introduce Selection, a Fall 2019 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a November 2019 Indie Next Pick, and a Library Reads October 2019 pick. Ordinary Girls was listed as one of the Must-Read Books of 2019 by O: The Oprah Magazine, Time, Bustle, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly, The Millions, The Week, Good Housekeeping, and others. Her work has been published in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The Fader, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The Best American Essays 2016, among other publications. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Kenyon Review, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A former Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and Consulting Editor at the Kenyon Review, she splits her time between Montréal and Miami Beach. Her second book, I Am Deliberate: A Novel, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books.

JAQUIRA DÍAZ

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Andrea Lawlor

FICT IO N

Paul considered real bookstores (as opposed to sex bookstores) the best places for afternoon cruising, the more serious cruising, date cruising. At night you were all set; you found yourself at a bar or party, drank drinks, met a person, and decamped with that person to a second location. Instant date. No need to arrange or plan, and complete flexibility in the likely case you found a more amenable situation at the last minute. Daytime cruising, when not at a tea dance or beer bust, required more finesse and more certainty. First off, both parties had more time to second-guess between the securing of the phone number and the calling of the phone number. Secondly, you saw the person in the harshest light and without any softening lens such as beer, wine, or whiskey. In Paul’s ranking of all possible daytime cruising locations, gay non-sex-shop bookstores ranked at the top: congregants within were most likely to be both out and literate, qualities Paul valued. He thought fondly of the hours he’d spent at Oscar Wilde or the Different Light back in New York or even the HQ 76 section of the university library’s stacks, though, to his endless disappointment, he’d only ever found library success in men’s rooms.

Paul believed in reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, staking out likely targets rather than canvassing broadly. He strongly preferred to have sex with or talk to people who liked being queer. He was less excited about people still shaking off the poisons of their homophobic families or small towns, or anybody raised religious who was currently

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ambivalent rather than angry about that religion: they might be (likely were) dirty and wild in bed but Paul found the shame, self-loathing, obsessive post-coital showering deeply unhot. He was not curious about other people’s families or spiritual beliefs. He was not excited by normal AT&T gays. He did not himself care to assimilate into the power structures of heteropatriarchal white Christian America, was bored and horrified by those who did. Bookstore cruising was also perfect for his current state: a little slower than bar cruising and thus good for someone with a broken part, like a splint. Paul loitered outside the door, pretending to study the posters announcing various benefits and open mics and documentaries of interest to the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual community. He filled his lungs with the hunter’s sweet air of expectation, and pushed inside.

From Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence magazine, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their writing has appeared in various literary journals including Ploughshares, Mutha, The Millions, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards.

ANDREA LAWLOR

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Ling Ma

FICT IO N

Todd opened the Gowers’ front door. Okay, ready! he yelled.

We put on our face masks and rubber gloves. We went inside, carrying empty boxes and garbage bags.

The door opened up to a large foyer. The walls of the staircase were hung with family photos. The Gower clan included a mother and father, a son and an older daughter. The father balding and portly, the mother, a bleached blonde, tightly trim with a wan smile, her hands crossed in her lap, displaying a pert French manicure, the manicure of choice among porn actresses and midwestern housewives.

How tragic, Genevieve pronounced.

Let’s go, ladies, Todd said. He loved to prod us and make us work.

The men hunted, and the women gathered. Each of us was assigned a division of sorts. Janelle and Ashley worked Craft Services, gathering cooking supplies and shelf-stable products that the moths and pantry rodents hadn’t touched. Rachel worked Health, accumulating prescription meds, bandages, aspirins, and skin-care products.

Genevieve worked Apparel, rifling through the closets for jackets and coats, but more often for quality linen tunics and silk blouses. I worked Entertainment, a broad category that included DVDs, books, magazines, boardgames, video games, and consoles.

Room by room, we amassed boxes.

The boxes were placed out in the hallways for Bob to inspect, taking out or adding items as he saw fit. As the rooms emptied and the boxes filled, Adam and Todd and the other guys would take the inspected boxes outside to the supply vans.

For some reason, this process took hours.

Every time we stalked, this feeling would come over me, imperceptible at first. It is hard to describe because it is close to nothing.

Gradually, the din of other people’s conversations or Todd’s heavy

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footsteps, his ugly, flat gait on the floorboards would fall away. I would forget where I was or why I was there. I would get lost in the taking of inventory, with the categorizing and gathering, the packing of everything into space-efficient arrangements in the same boxes. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Vertigo. Halo 2. Seinfeld: The Complete Series. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Scrooged. Tales from the Hood. Blow-Up. Apocalypse Now. Waiting to Exhale. The Conversation.

Sex and the City: The Complete Series. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Back to the Future. It was a trance. It was like burrowing underground, and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working.

The only sound that would cut through this ebb and flow was Bob. In every house, he would take the muzzle of his firearm, a vintage M1 carbine semi-rifle, and run it along the walls as he walked. We would hear that scraping everywhere, in the floors above us, below us, and know where he had been. It left a mark, a black jagged line across fleurde-lis wallpaper, sponge-painted designs, bare white walls. The scent of French vanilla drifted through the rooms. Occasionally, the scraping stopped, and we braced ourselves for the shot that would ring out. We never knew what he was shooting at: a bat trapped in an attic, a squirrel chasing leaves through the rain gutters, or nothing, nothing at all.

Finishing up in the entertainment room, I found my way upstairs to the study.

The shelves were almost all filled with children’s books. Only the top shelf held adult titles, vanity set pieces that gestured toward the cultured minds of the homeowners. In this case, it was a Shakespeare anthology, a Jane Austen anthology, the complete collected poems of Walt Whitman, and so on. They looked stiff, dusty, and barely opened.

All except for the Bible, at the very end of the shelf.

Opening up the book, I saw, on the inside front cover, written in frilly teen cursive script, the name of its owner. Property of Paige Marie Gower.

My eyes closed, I opened the Daily Grace Bible to a random page and placed my finger on the text. I’d read whatever verse I touched.

And David said unto God, I am in a great strait: let us fall now into the hand of the Lord; for his mercies are great: and let me not fall into the hand of man.

It was then that I heard it, a quiet sound, like paper rustling. I put the book down. I stood up, slowly, and approached the windows, where the sound was coming from. As I approached, I spotted something beneath the curtains. A pair of socked feet, red polka dots on orange.

I drew the curtains back.

From Severance

LING MA is author of the novel Severance , which received the Kirkus Prize and the Young Lions Fiction Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018.

Her work has appeared in Granta, Playboy, Vice, Ninth Letter, The Chicago Reader, and others. She holds an MFA from Cornell University and an AB from the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.

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Jake Skeets

PO ET RY

“Virginity”

Clouds in his throat, six months’ worth.

He bodies into me half cosmos, half coyote.

We become night on Bread Springs road. Shirts off, jeans halfway down, parked by an abandoned trailer. “No one lives here,” he whispers.

We become porch light curtained by moth wings, powdered into ash.

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“Glory”

Native American male. Early twenties. About 6’2”, 190 pounds.

Has the evening for a face.

— Possible public intoxication. Native American female. No ID. She reported being raped.

White shirt. No pants. Her legs swallowed the hotel.

— Shots fired. Shots fired. Group of males scattered. Native American possibly.

One has a skull tattoo. Some ran east on Boardman. The skull is still here.

— Medic unit requested. Sagebrush Bar. Unidentified male not responsive. Possible hit-and-run.

Witnesses described it as a man being spit out from the mouth of a 4x4.

— Yellow car heading north on Highway 666. Possible DWI. The car is kissing the median like a wasp against a window.

Its wings torn to pieces.

—

I just saw a young boy get hit by a train. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. He ran onto the tracks and the train hit him. It hit him.

He’s still moving.

He’s young. Maybe twenty. We’re on the Westside

by Walmart. Should I help him? He’s moving, he’s moving.

The train hit him. There’s blood all over him.

The train ate through him like a river eats through the arroyo. The train, it sounds like a river.

Like a river, a river goddamnit,

a river, a river,

ariverariverariverariverariverariverariver

a river — This is Officer Carson. Medic requested. Man down. Native male. Late twenties, early thirties. Stab wounds to the stomach. Pulse faint. Blood on the snow. He is being erased from the

JAKE SKEETS is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, a National Poetry Series-winning collection of poems. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.

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Genevieve Sly Crane

FICT IO N

Even as children, I knew that I loved Shannon enough to fail myself.

I loved her liar’s chin, tilted downward with the sharpness of a spade when she spoke. I loved her tiny, fluid fingers that stole gum and Tic Tacs so easily when cashiers rummaged under the counter. And I feared that seed deep within that I could see in her pupils if I disappointed her, if I showed her my own unease.

I see it so perfectly in our photographs now: we were little girls, with potbellies under bathing suits and eyes we hadn’t grown into yet, but my apprehension was there, wavering in my face, undulating with the heat waves behind us on the beach.

She scared me.

She ate raw cookie dough.

She let Corey Welsch touch between her legs the summer before fifth grade.

She stole tampons out of her mother’s bathroom cabinet, and together we poured water on them until they bloomed into swollen white petals under the backyard hose, then threw them on the windshield of her next-door neighbor’s car.

She picked up the dead seagull on the beach, its wingspan sagging, and held it at arm’s length, her mouth shut against the horseflies, while she plucked the best feathers and stuck them in her hair.

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—I’m a Wampanoag princess.

—You’re going to get a disease, I said.

And she took a feather out of her hair and licked the quill, her eyes on me the whole time, her ten-year-old knees jutting at me, her tongue dragging over the point till I turned away.

—Come and get me, bird flu.

She put the feather in my hair, and I shook it out in the walk back up the beach to my mother’s towel, but even when I lay in bed that night, I could feel it. The prickle or the curse, I wasn’t sure.

When we were eleven, my mother heard her say fuck.

I wasn’t permitted to see her again until I turned twelve. I saw her anyway. We lived half a mile apart from one another, a three-and-ahalf-minute scurry if panic propelled me. Late on clear summer nights I would run to her house, the hedges lining our town quivering in the breeze, my eyes averted from the cemetery and its glowing headstones in the moonlight. When I reached the light of her driveway I would stop, hands on my knees, wheezing out my run, so that when I saw her she wouldn’t know that I had been hurrying, that I had been afraid.

From Sorority

GENEVIEVE SLY CRANE is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and Stony Brook Southampton, where she received her MFA. She teaches in the Creative Writing and Literature BFA program at Stony Brook. Sorority (Scout Press, 2018) is her first publication.

42

Jia Tolentino

N O N FICT IO N

The call of self-expression turned the village of the internet into a city, which expanded at time-lapse speed, social connections bristling like neurons in every direction. At ten, I was clicking around a web ring to check out other Angelfire sites full of animal GIFs and Smash Mouth trivia. At twelve, I was writing five hundred words a day on a public LiveJournal. At fifteen, I was uploading photos of myself in a miniskirt on Myspace. By twenty-five, my job was to write things that would attract, ideally, a hundred thousand strangers per post. Now I’m thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection—this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.

As with the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I’d guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.

Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer. As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain

44

an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good. Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself.

Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture.

The Bush era is inextricable from the failures of cable news; the executive overreaches of the Obama years were obscured by the internet’s magnification of personality and performance; Trump’s rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their users in order to continue making money. But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative—and why are all those questions asking the same thing?

As we move about the internet, our personal data is tracked, recorded, and resold by a series of corporations—a regime of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary self-surveillance on social media.

If we think about buying something, it follows us around everywhere.

We can, and probably do, limit our online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us. On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are

filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.

Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

From Trick Mirror

is a staff writer at The New Yorker, formerly the deputy editor at Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin. She grew up in Texas, went to the University of Virginia, and got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Her book of essays, Trick Mirror, was a New York Times bestseller.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

JIA TOLENTINO

46

Genya Turovskaya

PO ET RY

Failure to Declare

I am beside myself I have no beast in this ring, no horse in this race Nobody always waves goodbye The stars are different here The wind is gusting in reverse I left something out, something crucial, crossing through the customs gate A figure, behind me, waving, reflected in the plexiglass partition I could recognize the shape but not the face I didn’t need to; I knew it An empty window Limp curtain flapping in the breeze I pitched forward, tried to right myself, but kept falling without end Keep falling to no end There was nothing there to catch on, snag against A tantalizing glitter, a blatant blank The fortune in the fortune cookie says Learn Chinese To have a fever And When one can one must Where do I live?

Where do I go when I go away?

The departures board was wiped clean

48

There was no message But something happens to interrupt all well-laid plans I was alert to the fog, a fugue of massing clouds, to a change in pressure, coalescing rivulets of rain A physical vibration, the faintest tremor of the ground beneath my feet, the shifting of tectonic plates The chafe, the plea in pleasure, for pleasure’s sake Or was the fortune: When one must one can?

I recognized the empty window, the tantalizing glitter of my own reflection The shape but not the face I knew it, that there would be no message, no way to get a message back I fell I fall I left I leave something out The ground beneath my feet gives way Where were we?

Here I am?

Where do I go?

Who is the witness to this story that I tell myself?

Is this rupture?

Rapture?

Attention? Inattention?

The bonds grown slack?

There is an errand I’ve been sent on An errancy

I am not spared I am inside the observation tower beside myself astride the horse I do not have a horse in this Nobody ever always waves goodbye goodbye The stars are different here, the stars do not make sense I can connect these burning dots There is a hummingbird There a dancing bear There a face with night pouring out of the black sockets of its eyes What are these strange celestial figurations?

Is any crossing safe?

When does the dancing bear claw its way back to nature?

When does a hummingbird become a hurricane?

Which is the miracle and which the natural disaster?

What is at stake?

GENYA TUROVSKAYA was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City.

She is the author of The Breathing Body of This Thought (Black Square Editions, 2019) and of the chapbooks Calendar (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2002), The Tides (Octopus Books, 2007), New Year’s Day (Octopus Books, 2011), and Dear Jenny (Supermachine, 2011). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2008. She is the co-translator of Elena Fanailova’s Russian Version (UDP, 2009, 2019) which won the University of Rochester’s Three Percent award for Best Translated Book of Poetry in 2010.

She is also a co-translator of Endarkenment : The Selected Poems of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). She lives in Brooklyn.

50

The Winners of the Whiting Award 1985–2020

Raymond Abbott, Fiction, 1985

Joan Chase, Fiction, 1987

Aria Aber, Poetry, 2020

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

Diannely Antigua, Poetry, 2020

Amanda Coplin, Fiction, 2013

Will Arbery, Drama, 2020

Leopoldine Core, Fiction, 2015

Elizabeth Arnold, Poetry, 2002

Eduardo C. Corral, Poetry, 2011

John Ash, Poetry, 1986

Patty Yumi Cottrell, Fiction, 2018

Kirsten Bakis, Fiction, 2004

Mark Cox, Poetry, 1987

Catherine Barnett, Poetry, 2004

Douglas Crase, Poetry, 1985

Clare Barron, Drama, 2017

Justin Cronin, Fiction, 2002

Elif Batuman, Nonfiction, 2010

Stanley Crouch, Nonfiction, 1991

Jen Beagin, Fiction, 2017

Michael Cunningham, Fiction, 1995

Jo Ann Beard, Nonfiction, 1997

Michael Dahlie, Fiction, 2010

Mischa Berlinski, Fiction, 2008

Charles D’Ambrosio, Fiction, 2006

Ciaran Berry, Poetry, 2012

J. D. Daniels, Nonfiction, 2016

Sherwin Bitsui, Poetry, 2006

Lydia Davis, Fiction, 1988

Scott Blackwood, Fiction, 2011

Nathan Alan Davis, Drama, 2018

Brian Blanchfield, Nonfiction, 2016

Tyree Daye, Poetry, 2019

Judy Blunt, Nonfiction, 2001

Connie Deanovich, Poetry, 1997

Anne Boyer, Poetry, Nonfiction, 2018

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Fiction,

Courtney A. Brkic, Fiction, 2003

Nonfiction, 2013

Joel Brouwer, Poetry, 2001

Hernan Diaz, Fiction, 2019

Jericho Brown, Poetry, 2009

Jaquira Díaz, Nonfiction, 2020

Michael Burkard, Poetry, 1988

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Poetry, 2016

Michael Byers, Fiction, 1998

Trudy Dittmar, Nonfiction, 2003

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Fiction, 2005

Matt Donovan, Poetry, 2010

Ryan Call, Fiction, 2011

Mark Doty, Poetry, 1994

Sheila Callaghan, Drama, 2007

Jennifer Dubois, Fiction, 2013

Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Poetry, 2019

Bruce Duffy, Fiction, 1988

Francisco Cantú, Nonfiction, 2017

Pam Durban, Fiction, 1987

Anthony Carelli, Poetry, 2015

Stuart Dybek, Fiction, 1985

Hayden Carruth, Poetry, 1986

Gerald Early, Nonfiction, 1988

Emily Carter, Fiction, 2001

Russell Edson, Poetry, 1989

52

Kim Edwards, Fiction, 2002

Stephen Adly Guirgis, Drama, 2006

Louis Edwards, Fiction, 1994

Danai Gurira, Drama, 2012

Erik Ehn, Drama, 1997

Daniel Hall, Poetry, 1998

Gretel Ehrlich, Nonfiction, 1987

Lisa Halliday, Fiction, 2017

Nancy Eimers, Poetry, 1998

W. David Hancock, Drama, 1998

Deborah Eisenberg, Fiction, 1987

Kent Haruf, Fiction, 1986

Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry, 2005

Michael Haskell, Poetry, 1999

Jeffrey Eugenides, Fiction, 1993

Ehud Havazelet, Fiction, 1999

Roger Fanning, Poetry, 1992

Terrance Hayes, Poetry, 1999

Anderson Ferrell, Fiction, 1996

Alan Heathcock, Fiction, 2012

Kathleen Finneran, Nonfiction, 2001

Amy Herzog, Drama, 2011

Ben Fountain, Fiction, 2007

Emily Hiestand, Poetry, 1990

Jonathan Franzen, Fiction, 1988

Rick Hilles, Poetry, 2008

Kennedy Fraser, Nonfiction, 1994

Lucas Hnath, Drama, 2015

Ian Frazier, Nonfiction, 1989

Eva Hoffman, Nonfiction, 1992

Nell Freudenberger, Fiction, 2005

Donovan Hohn, Nonfiction, 2008

Forrest Gander, Poetry, 1997

John Holman, Fiction, 1991

Cristina García, Fiction, 1996

Mary Hood, Fiction, 1994

Madeleine George, Drama, 2016

Jay Hopler, Poetry, 2009

David Gewanter, Poetry, 2002

Michelle Huneven, Fiction, 2002

Melissa James Gibson, Drama, 2002

Samuel D. Hunter, Drama, 2012

Dagoberto Gilb, Fiction, 1993

Ishion Hutchinson, Poetry, 2013

Samantha Gillison, Fiction, 2000

Naomi Iizuka, Drama, 1999

Aracelis Girmay, Poetry, 2015

James Ijames, Drama, 2017

Jody Gladding, Poetry, 1997

Major Jackson, Poetry, 2003

Allison Glock, Nonfiction, 2004

Michael R. Jackson, Drama, 2019

Molly Gloss, Fiction, 1996

Mitchell S. Jackson, Fiction, 2016

Rebecca Goldstein, Fiction, 1991

Tyehimba Jess, Poetry, 2006

Allegra Goodman, Fiction, 1991

Adam Johnson, Fiction, 2009

Jorie Graham, Poetry, 1985

Denis Johnson, Fiction, 1986

Lucy Grealy, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1995

Jenny Johnson, Poetry, 2015

Kaitlyn Greenidge, Fiction, 2017

R. S. Jones, Fiction, 1992

Elana Greenfield, Drama, Fiction, 2004

A. Van Jordan, Poetry, 2004

Linda Gregg, Poetry, 1985

Dan Josefson, Fiction, 2015

Gordon Grice, Nonfiction, 1999

Rajiv Joseph, Drama, 2009

Virginia Grise, Drama, 2013

Hansol Jung, Drama, 2018

Rinne Groff, Drama, 2005

Cynthia Kadohata, Fiction, 1991

Paul Guest, Poetry, 2007

Agymah Kamau, Fiction, 2003

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

Andrea Lawlor, Fiction, 2020

Sylvia Moss, Poetry, 1988

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

Ling Ma, Fiction, 2020

Josip Novakovich, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1997

Nathaniel Mackey, Fiction, Poetry, 1993

Sigrid Nunez, Fiction, 1993

54

Dennis Nurkse, Poetry, 1990

Rick Rofihe, Fiction, 1991

Antoinette Nwandu, Drama, 2018

Carlo Rotella, Nonfiction, 2007

Geoffrey O’Brien, Nonfiction, 1988

Jess Row, Fiction, 2003

Chris Offutt, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1996

Mary Ruefle, Poetry, 1995

Patrick O’Keeffe, Fiction, 2006

Sarah Ruhl, Drama, 2003

Dael Orlandersmith, Drama, 2008

Michael Ryan, Poetry, 1987

Daniel Orozco, Fiction, 2011

Russ Rymer, Nonfiction, 1995

Nadia Owusu, Nonfiction, 2019

Luc Sante, Nonfiction, 1989

ZZ Packer, Fiction, 1999

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nonfiction, 2010

Ann Pancake, Fiction, 2003

James Schuyler, Poetry, 1985

Suzan-Lori Parks, Drama, 1992

Salvatore Scibona, Fiction, 2009

Elena Passarello, Nonfiction, 2015

Danzy Senna, Fiction, 2002

Lydia Peelle, Fiction, 2010

Anton Shammas, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1991

Janet Peery, Fiction, 1993

Akhil Sharma, Fiction, 2001

Kathleen Peirce, Poetry, 1993

Lisa Shea, Fiction, 1993

Benjamin Percy, Fiction, 2008

Julie Sheehan, Poetry, 2008

Andrew X. Pham, Nonfiction, 2000

Mona Simpson, Fiction, 1986

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Poetry, 2013

Safiya Sinclair, Poetry, 2016

Tommy Pico, Poetry, 2018

Jake Skeets, Poetry, 2020

Claudia Roth Pierpont, Nonfiction, 1994

Genevieve Sly Crane, Fiction, 2020

Darryl Pinckney, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1986

Evan Smith, Drama, 2002

Katha Pollitt, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1992

Tracy K. Smith, Poetry, 2005

Reinaldo Povod, Drama, 1987

Dalia Sofer, Fiction, 2007

Padgett Powell, Fiction, 1986

Jason Sommer, Poetry, 2001

Stephanie Powell Watts, Fiction, 2013

Elizabeth Spires, Poetry, 1996

Brontez Purnell, Fiction, 2018

Jane Springer, Poetry, 2010

Hanna Pylväinen, Fiction, 2012

Matthew Stadler, Fiction, 1995

Hugh Raffles, Nonfiction, 2009

Frank Stewart, Poetry, 1986

Keith Reddin, Drama, 1992

Ruth Stone, Poetry, 1986

Spencer Reece, Poetry, 2005

Patricia Storace, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1996

Roger Reeves, Poetry, 2015

Kelly Stuart, Drama, 2000

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Nonfiction, 2012

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Nonfiction, 2004

Mark Richard, Fiction, 1990

Melanie Sumner, Fiction, 1995

Atsuro Riley, Poetry, 2012

Mary Swander, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1994

Harriet Ritvo, Nonfiction, 1990

Margaret Talbot, Nonfiction, 1999

José Rivera, Drama, 1992

Lysley Tenorio, Fiction, 2008

Lewis Robinson, Fiction, 2003

James Thomas Stevens, Poetry, 2000

James Robison, Fiction, 1985

Clifford Thompson, Nonfiction, 2013

Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Fiction, 2019

Greg Williamson, Poetry, 1998

LB Thompson, Poetry, 2010

August Wilson, Drama, 1986

Melanie Rae Thon, Fiction, 1997

Tracey Scott Wilson, Drama, 2004

Merritt Tierce, Fiction, 2019

Tobias Wolff, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1989

Christopher Tilghman, Fiction, 1990

John Wray, Fiction, 2001

Jia Tolentino, Nonfiction, 2020

Austin Wright, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985

Peter Trachtenberg, Nonfiction, 2007

C. D. Wright, Poetry, 1989

Vu Tran, Fiction, 2009

Franz Wright, Poetry, 1991

Judy Troy, Fiction, 1996

Stephen Wright, Fiction, 1990

Tony Tulathimutte, Fiction, 2017

Lauren Yee, Drama, 2019

Jack Turner, Nonfiction, 2007

Martha Zweig, Poetry, 1999

Genya Turovskaya, Poetry, 2020 Mark Turpin, Poetry, 1997 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 Joshua Weiner, Poetry, 2002 Timberlake Wertenbaker, Drama, 1989 Kate Wheeler, Fiction, 1994 Simone White, Poetry, 2017 Colson Whitehead, Fiction, 2000 Marianne Wiggins, Fiction, 1989 Amy Wilentz, Nonfiction, 1990 Damien Wilkins, Fiction, 1992 Claude Wilkinson, Poetry, 2000 Phillip B. Williams, Poetry, 2017

No award was granted in 2014

PER MISSIO NS

Introduction copyright © 2020 by Esmé Weijun Wang.

Excerpt from Hard Damage by Aria Aber. Copyright © 2020 by Aria Aber. Published

by University of Nebrasa Press in 2019. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Ugly Music by Diannely Antigua. Copyright © 2020 by Diannely Antigua.

Published by YesYes Books in 2019. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbery. Copyright © 2020 by Will Arbery. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Ordinary Girls: A Memoir by Jaquira Díaz. Copyright © 2020 by Jaquira Díaz. Published by Algonquin Books in 2019. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. Copyright © 2020 by Andrea Lawlor. Published by Vintage in 2019. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Severance by Ling Ma. Copyright © 2018 by Ling Ma. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Excerpt from Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets. Copyright © 2020 by Jake Skeets. Published by Milkweed Editions in 2019. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Sorority by Genevieve Sly Crane. Copyright © 2020 by Genevieve Sly Crane. Published by Gallery/Scout Press in 2018. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino. Copyright © 2020 by Jia Tolentino.

Published by Random House in 2019. All rights reserved.

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Excerpt from The Breathing Body of This Thought by Genya Turovskaya. Copyright © 2020 by Genya Turovskaya. Published by Black Square Editions in 2019. All rights reserved.

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