March 23, 2016 Whiting Awards 2016 Introducing the Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards By Dan Piepenbring The 2016 Whiting honorees. Top row, from left: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Madeleine George, Layli Long Soldier, Safiya Sinclair, J. D. Daniels, Mitchell S. Jackson. Bottom row: Alice Sola Kim, Catherine Lacey, Ocean Vuong, Brian Blanchfield. We’re delighted to announce the ten winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards: Brian Blanchfield, nonfiction J. D. Daniels, nonfiction LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, poetry Madeleine George, drama Mitchell S. Jackson, fiction Alice Sola Kim, fiction Catherine Lacey, fiction Layli Long Soldier, poetry Safiya Sinclair, poetry Ocean Vuong, poetry For the second year, the Daily is proud to feature selected work from all the Whiting honorees. Click each name above to read on and learn more about them. You can also see them read tomorrow night (Thursday, March 24) at BookCourt—John Wray, himself a former Whiting recipient, will host the event. Founded in 1985, the Whiting Awards, of fifty thousand dollars each, are based on “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” The program has awarded more than six million dollars to three hundred writers and poets, including Jonathan Franzen, Alice McDermott, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, and The Paris Review’s own Mona Simpson and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Click here for a list of all the previous honorees. If you’re curious about last year’s winners, you can read some of their work here. Congratulations to this year’s honorees!
March 23, 2016 Whiting Awards 2016 Mitchell S. Jackson, Fiction By Whiting Honorees Photo: John Ricard. Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel, The Residue Years (2013), was praised by publications including the New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Times (London). The novel won the Ernest Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Salon, and Tin House, among other publications. He serves on the faculty at New York University and Columbia University. Citation Mitchell Jackson writes into Portland like Edward P. Jones writes into Washington, D.C., with his judicious left eye on the full hearts of his characters and his vigilant right eye attuned to the wolf at their door. His classically orchestrated novel, “The Residue Years,” novel, is suffused with humor, lyricism and compassion. It follows the parallel narratives of a mother and son whose lives are shaped by their involvement with drugs. Grace, the mother, recently released from jail, is struggling to stay clean. Her son, Champ, a college student, is dealing on the side, and convincing himself that he’ll avoid being caught. Jackson is a powerfully confident writer, with an unerring ability to embody voices. Grace’s fearfulness and doubt and Champ’s certainty and swagger form striking counterpoints in a story about the way poverty and policy can destroy a family. From The Residue Years Peoples, you listening? Bet. This is how it go. If you’re cold enough they name you. Clutch or Jack Knife or K-Dub or 3-D or Dead Eye or D-Reid or Big Third or Smooth or DaBell—score twenty or thirty a season, and bam, you’re Stu or Pickle or Free or Fish or Big Blass or King Cole or Doc—they’ve christened you T-hop or B-hop or Pooh or Fluff or the Honey Bee or Houseguest or B-Moore or J. D. or Bookie. Handle your biz lugis luge and everywhere they’ll say your name, call out T-Cage, T. T., Gumby, Banger, A-Train, Nickle, Action, P-Strick, JoJo, L. V., T-Jones, Blazer. We’re talking MVPs and state champs and first-team All-Everythings, dudes who anyday you wanted it would kill your weak ass at the park. In my city, hoop’s the hegemony. In the Rose City, the P, what the deal is, if they name you, you’re anointed. And in the P that’s what we cherish, what we love if nothing else: Year after year after year we harangue who’s greatest of the ones who dropped 40s and 50s pre a three-pointer, which phenoms scored 60! 70! 80! Guys named J-Bird or Zelly-Roo or T. B. or D-Stoud or Slash or T-Bone or T-Ross or T-Hamp or Juice or Ice or Silk—middle school man-childs who played not a lick beyond the eighth, or the luckier-than-thous who hang-timed off to college handcuffed by the city’s collective hope. The General and 2-Ounce and Stretch and Big City and Slider and Truck and Duke and the one we named the GOAT: legends, a few of them, all-leaguers in every league they played. My word, a nickname is a christening, meaning you got a shot, meaning they think you can go, which is one chance more than most of us, so no wonder the chosen are all there is to speak of. No wonder when, for most, hoop’s about our only shot to be better and bigger than the rest, to secure a life that counts. But on the flip side, fall short and then what? Read more work from the 2016 Whiting Award winners here.
March 23, 2016 Whiting Awards 2016 J. D. Daniels, Nonfiction By Whiting Honorees Photo: Asaf Geffen. J. D. Daniels studied at the University of Louisville and Boston University. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, n+1, Oxford American, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere. Daniels is the recipient of The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection, The Correspondence, will be published in 2017. Read More
March 22, 2016 Whiting Awards 2016 Ocean Vuong, Poetry By Whiting Honorees Photo: Peter Bienkowski Ocean Vuong holds a B.A. from Brooklyn College and will complete an M.F.A. from NYU in 2016. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. He has published two chapbooks, No (2013) and Burnings (2010); his first full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, will be published by this year. Vuong is the recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is originally from Saigon and lives in New York City. Citation What a pleasure to behold how Ocean Vuong writes with such attention to the inside of our ears, the aural island. This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level. His collection, “Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” forms an autobiography of sorts, tracing relationships with fathers, mothers, and lovers, and with a country that Vuong left when he was a young boy. The imagery in his work is often shimmeringly beautiful, but it’s cut through by intimations of violence and its after effects. The collection is a stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world. Telemachus Like any good son, I pull my father out of the water, drag him by his hair through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail the waves rush in to erase. Because the city beyond the shore is no longer where we left it. Because the bombed cathedral is now a cathedral of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far I might sink. Do you know who I am, Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer is the bullet hole in his back, brimming with seawater. He is so still I think he could be anyone’s father, found the way a green bottle might appear at a boy’s feet containing a year he has never touched. I touch his ears. No use. I turn him over. To face it. The cathedral in his sea-black eyes. The face not mine—but one I will wear to kiss all my lovers goodnight: the way I seal my father’s lips with my own & begin the faithful work of drowning. Homewrecker & this is how we danced: our mothers’ white dresses spilling from our feet, late August turning our hands dark red. & this is how we loved: a fifth of vodka & an afternoon in the attic, your fingers through my hair—my hair a wildfire. We covered our ears & your father’s tantrum turned to heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed into a coffin. In the museum of the heart there are two headless people building a burning house. There was always the shotgun above the fireplace. Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not the car, the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive, put down the phone. Because the year is a distance we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say: this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue. Read more work from the 2016 Whiting Award winners here.
March 22, 2016 Whiting Awards 2016 Layli Long Soldier, Poetry By Whiting Honorees Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. She has served as a contributing editor of Drunken Boat. Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, and other publications. She is the recipient of the 2015 NACF National Artist Fellowship and a 2015 Lannan Literary Fellowship. Her collection of poetry, WHEREAS, will be published in 2017. Long Soldier resides in Tsaile, Arizona, where she is an English faculty member at Diné College. Read More
March 22, 2016 Whiting Awards 2016 Catherine Lacey, Fiction By Whiting Honorees Photo: Lauren Volo. Catherine Lacey has published work in Oxford American, McSweeney’s Quarterly, the New York Times, Vice, AFAR, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship, and a resident at the Omi International Arts Center. In the fall of 2016, she will be the Kittredge Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. She is the author of the novel Nobody Is Ever Missing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Her second novel and first story collection are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Read More