Announcing the 2019 Whiting Award Winners

On the 34th anniversary of the Whiting Awards, the Whiting Foundation gives $50,000 each to ten diverse emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The winners are honored today, March 20, 2019, at a ceremony at the New York Historical Society, with keynote by Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Whiting Award winner Adam Johnson.

The Whiting Awards, established by the Whiting Foundation in 1985, remain one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts to emerging writers, and are based on the criteria of early-career achievement and the promise of superior literary work to come. Eight million has been awarded to 340 fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, and playwrights to date.

“Every year, our corps of expert anonymous nominators point us to some of the most exciting and vital work happening today,” said Courtney Hodell, Director of Literary Programs. “These names may be new to us, but they’re writing the future of literature in this country.”

All ten of this year’s winners will read at a free, public event introduced by previous Whiting Award winner Alexander Chee on March 21, at 7:00pm at The Strand Bookstore in Manhattan.

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The winners are:

Poetry: Kayleb Rae Candrilli‘s verse memoir is “the most unsettling of lullabies,” unfolding “with savage grace as it lays bare the violence and isolation of a trans person’s coming of age.”

Kayleb Rae Candrilli is author of What Runs Over, winner of the 2016 Pamet River Prize, from YesYes Books. They are also author of All the Gay Saints, winner of the 2018 Saturnalia Book Prize and forthcoming in 2020. Candrilli is published or forthcoming in Puerto del Sol, Booth, and RHINO, among others. Candrilli was a 2015 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow in Nonfiction, and a 2017 Fellow in Poetry. They live in Philadelphia.

Poetry: Tyree Daye‘s “pictures of a river life are strung together in language that is clear, lucid, unexpected, and often unforgettable: image-making of the highest order.”

Tyree Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of two poetry collections: River Hymns, 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner, and Cardinal, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2020. Daye is a 2017 Ruth Lilly Finalist and Cave Canem fellow. Daye’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, the New York Times, and Nashville Review. He won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship and the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writers-In-Residence, and he is a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award Finalist.

Fiction: Hernan Diaz‘s debut novel crafts language both “plainspoken and wildly, even cosmically, evocative” to explore “two kinds of wilderness: the immensely taxing newness of the American West and the still-forming interiority of a Swedish immigrant desperate to find a way back home.”

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.

Drama: Michael R. Jackson‘s forthcoming musical, A Strange Loop, “is robustly intelligent, unflinchingly honest, dizzyingly screwball, and a sheer delight.”

Michael R. Jackson holds a BFA and MFA in playwriting and musical theatre writing from the NYU 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 co-wrote book for the musical adaptation of the 2007 horror film Teeth with composer and co-bookwriter Anna K. Jacobs. He wrote book, music, and lyrics for the musicals White Girl in Danger and A Strange Loop (which receives its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in co-production with Page 73 productions in May of 2019). He has received a 2017 Jonathan Larson Grant, a 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a 2017 ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, 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.

Nonfiction: Terese Marie Mailhot “writes with a fierce and unyielding commitment to creating an unlikeable—which is to say, fully human—female narrator,” mobilizing her “intelligence, clarity, honesty, and complexity.”

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 bestseller.

Nonfiction: Nadia Owusu‘s “profound meditation on rootlessness, hybridity, and resilience” is constituted of “beautifully restless prose, always in search of music and meaning.”

Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. Simon and Schuster will publish her first book, Aftershocks, in 2020. Her lyric essay chapbook, So Devilish a Fire, is a winner of 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.

Fiction: Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People. She writes with a “bold new voice—young, gifted, black, unafraid of its own contradictions, and powerful enough to take the writer anywhere she wishes to go.”

Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s “The Organist,” The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review, The LARB Quarterly Journal, and other publications. Her short story “Heads of the Colored People…” 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. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, was longlisted 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.

Fiction: Merritt Tierce‘s “clear-eyed, dark-hearted, and mordantly funny” debut novel “approaches economically marginalized lives with an unflinching and off-kilter gaze.”

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” Author. 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 is currently a staff writer on 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, and physicality.

Poetry: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal transports us “into a wilderness, a porous border world of dual (or multiple) identities” with lines that “blaze with anger and empathy.”

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley. She is the author of the collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series, 2017), a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Boston Review, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, and is pursuing her doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Drama: Lauren Yee “examines the legacy of the Khmer Rouge in a play that also takes on the dynamics of father/daughter relationships and the joyful legacy of Cambodian pop music,” using dialogue that “asserts its vibrant, specific life.”

Lauren Yee is a playwright born and raised in San Francisco. She lives in New York City. She received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University and her MFA in playwriting from UCSD. Lauren’s work includes King of the Yees, The Great Leap, Cambodian Rock Band, Ching Chong Chinaman, The Hatmaker’s Wife, and others. She was a Dramatists Guild fellow, a MacDowell fellow, a MAP Fund grantee, and others. She is the winner of the Kesselring Prize and the Francesca Primus Prize. She has been a finalist for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the ATCA/Steinberg Award, and others. The Hatmaker’s Wife was an Outer Critics Circle nominee for the John Gassner Award for best play by a new American playwright. Lauren is a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab, a 2018/2019 Hodder fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and a New Dramatists playwright.

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About the keynote speaker: Adam Johnson is the author of Fortune Smiles, winner of the National Book Award and the Story Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the California Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Johnson’s other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. His previous books are Emporium, a short story collection, and the novel Parasites like Us. Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco. He was a 2009 Whiting Award winner in Fiction.

About the award: With the Whiting Awards, the Whiting Foundation hopes to identify exceptional new writers who have yet to make their mark in the literary culture. Though the writers may not necessarily be young (talent may emerge at any age), the grant ideally offers recipients a first opportunity to devote themselves fully to writing, and the recognition has a significant impact. Whiting winners have gone on to win numerous prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Obie Award, and MacArthur, Guggenheim, and Lannan fellowships, and their work has shaped and advanced literature in this country over the past three decades.

No submissions are accepted; the one hundred nominators who suggest the candidates and the judges who select the winners are all invited by the Foundation, and all work anonymously. The pool of nominators changes annually, and has included writers, professors, editors, agents, critics, booksellers, artistic directors of theaters, dramaturgs, and directors of literary festivals. Winners are chosen by a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors who meet four times during the course of a year to debate the work and select the final ten.

In addition to the Whiting Awards for emerging writers, the Foundation’s programs in support of literature include the Creative Nonfiction Grant for the completion of deeply researched, imaginatively written works in progress, and the new Literary Magazine Prize, which celebrates the determined and devoted publications that nurture new writers. The Foundation also supports the humanities through with the Public Engagement Fellowship, for faculty who are undertaking projects to infuse the nuance and rich context of the humanities into public culture, 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.