Tope Folarin. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Tope Folarin is a Nigerian American writer based in Washington, DC. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013 and was shortlisted once again in 2016. He was also named to the 2019 Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. A Particular Kind of Black Man is his first book.

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An excerpt from A Particular Kind of Black Man:

Tayo and I learned early on that all junkyards are basically the same. Dad had been taking us to junkyards all over Utah since we were toddlers, and we’d grown accustomed to the sights. At the front of the entire mess is a shack that’s supposed to serve as an entryway, checkout counter, and, depending on the whims of the owner, a bar as well. Inside the shack there are car parts strewn all over the place: exhaust pipes on the counter, alternators and radiators spread across the floor, license plates everywhere. At the back of the shack there’s a door that leads to the junkyard, a gate to another land.

For each junkyard is like an unexplored planet. The terrain is always unfamiliar; the air barely breathable. There are craters everywhere, and my father moves forward carefully, scouting the path ahead before calling back telling us it’s okay to follow. Every junkyard looks like the site of a massive industrial explosion, the secret innards of various contraptions laid out for us to see, while we roam about like postapocalyptic scavengers searching for the parts that will make our dying car go. Read More

Steven Dunn. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Steven Dunn, aka Pot Hole (cuz he’s deep in these streets) is the author of two novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press: Potted Meat (2016) and water & power (2018). Potted Meat was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists, and adapted to a short film by Foothills Productions. The Usual Route has played at L.A. International Film Festival, Houston International Film Festival, and others. He was born and raised in West Virginia, and teaches in the M.F.A. programs at Regis University and Cornell College.

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An excerpt from Potted Meat:

LOSE A TURN

Grandma thinks I’m her husband again. He died before I was born. She says to me, Remember when you came home from the mines all dirty and took me dancin. Yeah, I say, we had big fun. And that one gal, she says, whats her name, you know, that slew-footed heffa, the one starin at you. Aw cmon now, I say, that was nuthin, you know I only got eyes for you.

Grandma slips back in. She says, Boy, you wash them dishes yet. I was just about to, I say. Well what you waitin on. She changes the channel to Wheel of Fortune and solves a puzzle before I do, and before the people on the show do. Them some slow-ass folks on that show, she says. A commercial comes on. She looks at me. That was a real nice date, huh, dontcha remember. Read More

Jordan E. Cooper. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Jordan E. Cooper is an OBIE Award–winning playwright and performer who was most recently chosen to be one of OUT Magazine’s “Entertainer of the Year.” Last spring he had a sold out run of his play Ain’t No Mo’, a New York Times Critics Pick. Jordan created a pandemic-centered short film called “Mama Got A Cough” that’s been featured in National Geographic and was named “Best of 2020” by the New York Times. He is currently filming The Ms. Pat Show, an R-rated “old school” sitcom he created for BET+, which will debut later this year. He can also be seen as “Tyrone” in the final season of FX’s Pose.

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An excerpt from Ain’t No Mo’:

ZAMATA: Free?

WOMAN: (To TV) Bitch said free.

ZAMATA: What free?

WOMAN: (To TV) What country?

NEWSWOMAN: Land of the free.

WOMAN: (To TV) What free?

ZAMATA: What land?

NEWSWOMAN: This land. Read More

Joshua Bennett. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Joshua Bennett is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), Owed (Penguin, 2020), and Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), which was a winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. He is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ford Foundation, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. His next book of creative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

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An excerpt from “Where Is Black Life Lived?”:

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the role of air in African American letters. The people that could fly. Eric Garner. Christina Sharpe highlighting the link between anti-black racism and the weather. It bears remembering. For the legal studies scholar and foundational critical race theorist Derrick Bell, one of the first characteristics of the black utopia he describes in his classic vignette, “Afrolantica Awakening,” is that it is simply a place where we can breathe. A space of celebration and retreat, somehow flourishing both inside and beyond the constraints of the present order. The sanctuary; the dancehall; my grandmother’s salon, glistening at a distance. When we turn to the written page, where is Black life lived? Anywhere. Everywhere. Underwater, outer space, underground. Even where there is no air at all. We imagine it as if it were otherwise. We conjure a world that is worthy of us. And then we gather there: unbowed, unburied, unabashed in our joy. Read More

For the seventh consecutive year, in 2021 The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the winners of the 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:

• Joshua Bennett, poetry and nonfiction
• Jordan E. Cooper, drama
• Steven Dunn, fiction
• Tope Folarin, fiction
• Donnetta Lavinia Grays, drama
• Marwa Helal, poetry
• Sarah Stewart Johnson, nonfiction
• Sylvia Khoury, drama
• Ladan Osman, poetry
• Xandria Phillips, poetry

Since 1985, the Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come. Previous recipients include Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Tony Kushner, Sigrid Nunez, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mona Simpson, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Colson Whitehead. Explore all the winners here.

Congratulations to this year’s honorees. And for more great writing from Whiting Award recipients, check out our collections of work from the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 winners.