April 6, 2022 Whiting Awards 2022 Introducing the Winners of the 2022 Whiting Awards By The Paris Review For the eighth consecutive year, The Paris Review is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Whiting Awards. As in previous years, we’re also delighted to share excerpts of work by each of the winners. Here’s the list of the 2021 honorees: Claire Boyles, fiction Rita Bullwinkel, fiction Ina Cariño, poetry Anthony Cody, poetry Anaïs Duplan, nonfiction Alexis Pauline Gumbs, nonfiction Megha Majumdar, fiction Jesse McCarthy, nonfiction Nana Nkweti, fiction Claire Schwartz, poetry Read More
April 6, 2022 On Photography Does the Parent Own the Child’s Body?: On Taryn Simon’s Sleep By Rachel Cusk Taryn Simon, detail from Sleep (2020–2021), 2021. When we take pictures of our children, do we really know what we are doing, or why? The contemporary parent records their child’s image with great frequency, often to the maximum degree afforded by technology. Inasmuch as the baby or child is an extension or externalization of the parent’s own self, these images might be seen as attempts to equate the production of a child with an artistic act. The task of the artist is to externalize his or her own self, to re-create that self in object form. A parent, presented with the object of the baby, might mistake the baby for an authored work. Equally, he or she might find their existence in an object outside themselves intolerable. In both cases the taking of a photograph is an attempt to transform the irreducibly personal value of the baby into something universal by proposing or offering up its reality. Yet what the image records is not so much the reality of the baby as that of the person looking at it. If the baby or child is a created work, it is one whose agenda remains a mystery to its creator. Read More
April 6, 2022 Whiting Awards 2022 Anthony Cody, Poetry By Anthony Cody Anthony Cody. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan. Anthony Cody is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest and the 2021 American Book Award. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN America / Jean Stein Book Award, and was longlisted for the Believer Magazine Editor’s Award. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California, he has lineage in the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. He collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio, and serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press and as a poetry editor for Omnidawn. Read More
April 6, 2022 Whiting Awards 2022 Ina Cariño, Poetry By Ina Cariño Ina Cariño. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan. Ina Cariño holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Guernica, Diode, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. Cariño is a Kundiman fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Cariño was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. In 2019, they founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community. Read More
April 6, 2022 Whiting Awards 2022 Jesse McCarthy, Nonfiction By Jesse McCarthy Jesse McCarthy. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan. Jesse McCarthy is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of the essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?—a Time and Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year—and The Fugitivities, a novel. His writing on culture, politics, and literature has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, and n+1. He also serves as a contributing editor at The Point. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read More
April 6, 2022 Whiting Awards 2022 Nana Nkweti, Fiction By Nana Nkweti Nana Nkweti. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan. Nana Nkweti is the author of the story collection Walking on Cowrie Shells. An AKO Caine Prize finalist and alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross, and Clarion West, among others. She has studied international law and trained and practiced as a nurse, and is now a professor of English at the University of Alabama. Read More