Here are the winners of the 2026 Whiting Award for Emerging Writers.

In a ceremony on Wednesday night, the Whiting Foundation announced the ten recipients of the 2026 Whiting Award for Emerging Writers. The award comes with a $50,000 purse to recognize the recipients’ “outstanding accomplishments and promise,” and is often seen as a bellwether for future literary stardom. Here are this year’s winners, along with the judges’ citations about their work:

Negar Azimi (Nonfiction)

Judges’ citation:
Across her writing and reportage, Negar Azimi re-animates the past into a timeless and intense present. She explores how individuals inhabit history and how history lives through them. Azimi weaves together memory, place, and exile to create a compelling story of heartbreak; a story of the lives we lead and the many more we do not.

Elaine Castillo (Fiction)

Judges’ citation:
In her fiction and essays, Elaine Castillo deftly translates worlds into words and words into worlds. Her work is brave and demanding, grounding our sense of present and future. Her sharp observations make us laugh, make us question and regret, and offer a delicious modern critique of unhinged times.

Karen Hao (Nonfiction)

Judges’ citation:
Karen Hao’s work is evidence of the literary art of investigative journalism at a time when it’s increasingly threatened. Through her precise storytelling, Hao offers a clarifying perspective amid the AI mania and lays bare the ravenous, profit-seeking egos driving it. Lucid and tenacious, her writing reveals the hubris and moral bankruptcy of those who seek to alter the fabric of human existence.

Hajar Hussaini (Poetry)

Judges’ citation:
Hajar Hussaini’s work is a marvel of poetic architecture, one that propels readers to consider what war destroys and what remains. Her poems exemplify how mere fragments can contain the entirety of times, places, and people we thought lost. Defiant, they refuse to equate that loss with erasure. Hussaini assembles the shards of her home city of Kabul into a mosaic, honoring its history, culture, and future.

Hilary Leichter (Fiction)

Judges’ citation:
Time bends in the hands of Hilary Leichter as she traces post-pandemic loss to our upended present. Her writing is assured and radiant; her fluid imagination shapes lush worlds, at once uncanny and beautiful. With nonconformist narration and characteristic whimsy, her work offers us a space to wonder and reflect in a fraught time.

Lara Mimosa Montes (Fiction)

Judges’ citation:
Lara Mimosa Montes adeptly slows time to explore interiority and liminal territories. Her work is formally innovative and plays with the possibilities of narration, all while being fully tangible, present. Montes is daring, her work unafraid to wrestle with the most complex and foundational ideas, yet doing so on her own terms.

Brittany Rogers (Poetry)

Judges’ citation:
Brittany Rogers’s work glows with profound intimacy and care for the communities she calls kin. Her writing is an unabashed celebration of place, a home for motherhood, matrilineal struggle, kink, and the pastoral. It’s a genius re-mapping of Detroit for those lost in its mythology, the native daughter challenging us to recalibrate our sight. Her love for the city is palpable, imbued with her frankness, her fun, her queerness, and her history.

Alison C. Rollins (Poetry)

Judges’ citation:
Alison C. Rollins’s poetry possesses a familiarity across literary traditions that infuses it with depth and striking immediacy. Her painstaking research closes the gap between past and future, contributing to a new way of seeing. Every phrase carefully lends a rhythmic, physical intensity. Riveting on the page, it sings when given voice.

Celine Song (Drama)

Judges’ citation:
Celine Song pushes the bounds of theater with her moving excavation of humanity and love. She peels away historical narrative, challenging audiences to explore what stories remain below the surface, what art is staged, and who gets to tell the story on their own terms. Song writes with an adept eye and ear, examining time and rendering the choral and communal, the singularity of human life.

Carvell Wallace (Nonfiction)

Judges’ citation:
Carvell Wallace’s writing is at once revelatory and discreet. It is a testament to radical care, practicing vulnerability to transform ache and memory into tenderness. His is a work of coming to terms with the odds, surviving them, and doing so with grace, radiance, generosity, and spirit.