March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Merritt Tierce, Fiction By Merritt Tierce Merritt Tierce. Photo: Kent Barker. 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 Honoree. 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. * An excerpt from Love Me Back: 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 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. Read More
March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Fiction By Nafissa Thompson-Spires Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Photo: Adrianne Mathiowetz. Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the McSweeney’s column“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: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology” 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 long-listed 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. * An excerpt from Heads of the Colored People: 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. Read More
March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Nadia Owusu, Nonfiction By Nadia Owusu Nadia Owusu. Photo: Camarena Photo. Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. Simon & 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. * An excerpt from Aftershocks: 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. Read More
March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Terese Marie Mailhot, Nonfiction By Terese Marie Mailhot Terese Marie Mailhot. Photo: Mark Woodward. Terese Marie Mailhot graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an M.F.A. in fiction. Mailhot’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Times, Carve Magazine, and elsewhere. The recipient of several fellowships—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 best seller. * An excerpt from Heart Berries: 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. Read More
March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Michael R. Jackson, Drama By Michael R. Jackson Michael R. Jackson. Photo: Joey Stocks. Michael R. Jackson holds a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. in playwriting and musical theater writing from NYU’s 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 cowrote the book for the musical adaptation of the 2007 horror film Teeth with composer and co-bookwriter Anna K. Jacobs. He wrote the book, music, and lyrics for the musicals White Girl in Danger and A Strange Loop (which receives its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in coproduction with Page 73 Productions in May 2019). He has received a 2017 Jonathan Larson Grant, a 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a 2017 ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, and 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. * Excerpt from A Strange Loop: (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 university-and-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! Read More
March 20, 2019 Whiting Awards 2019 Hernan Diaz, Fiction By Hernan Diaz Hernan Diaz. Photo: Jason Fulford. Hernan Diaz 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. * An excerpt from In the Distance: 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. Read More