Every year since 1985 The Whiting Foundation has awarded 10 emerging fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama writers $ 50,000 each. Past Whiting Award recipients include Colson Whitehead (2000), Alexander Chee (2003), Terese Marie Mailhot (2019) and Jia Tolentino (2020).
This year’s winners were announced April 14 through a virtual ceremony and on Twitter and Facebook. There they are!
Joshua Bennett is the author of three collections of poetry and literary criticism: The sobbing school (Penguin, 2016), Due (Penguin, 2020), and Once owned by myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), who won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. He is Mellon’s assistant professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. Bennett holds a PhD in English from Princeton University and a Masters in Theater 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, MIT, 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 non-fiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, comes from Knopf.
Jordan E. Cooper is an OBIE Award-winning playwright and recording artist last named one of Out Magazine’s Entertainer of the Year. Last spring, he had a sold-out series of his play Ain’t No Mo ‘, a choice of a New York Times critic. Jordan created a pandemic-centered short film called Mama has a cough featured in National Geographic and named the Best of 2020 by the New York Times. He is currently filming The Mrs. Pat Show, an old-school R-rated sitcom he created for BET +, which debuts later this year. He can also be seen as Tyrone in FX’s final season Attitude
Steven Dunn, also known as Pot Hole (because he’s deep in these streets), is the author of two Tarpaulin Sky Press novels: Pickled Meat (2016) and Hydropower (2018). Pickled Meat was a Colorado Book Award finalist, nominated for Granta magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists list, and adapted for a short film by Foothills Productions. The usual route, based on Pickled Meat, played at LA International Film Festival, Houston International Film Festival and others. Born and raised in West Virginia, he teaches MFA programs at Regis University and Cornell College.
Tope Folarin is a Nigerian American writer based in Washington, DC. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013 and was shortlisted again in 2016. He was also named on the Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40 in 2019. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two master’s degrees as a Rhodes scholar. A special kind of black man is his first book.
Donnetta Lavinia Grays is a Brooklyn playwright who proudly hails from Columbia, South Carolina. Her plays include Where we stand warriors don’t cry, last night and the night before, laid to rest, the review or how to eat your opposition, the new normal, and The cowboy diesDonnetta has been nominated for the Lucille Lortel, Drama League and AUDELCO awards. She has received the Helen Merrill Playwrighting Award, the National Theater Conference Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, the Lilly Award, the Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award and is the first recipient of the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. She is currently commissioned by Steppenwolf, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, WP Theater, and True Love Productions.
Sarah Stewart Johnson is an associate professor of planetary science at Georgetown University. A former Rhodes scholar and White House fellow, she received her PhD from MIT and has worked on NASA’s Spirit Opportunity, and Curiosity robbers. She is also a visiting scientist at the Planetary Environments Lab at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Sylvia Khoury is a New York-born writer of French and Lebanese descent. Her plays include Sell Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power strip (LCT3), Against the hill (Ensemble Studio Theater), and The Place Women GoShe is currently commissioned for Lincoln Center, Williamstown Theater Festival and Seattle Repertory Theater. Awards include the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and the Jay Harris Commission, and a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents / Hatcher Awards. She is a member of EST / Youngblood and previously a member of the 2018–2019 Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop in the Lark and the 2016–2018 WP Lab. Her plays have been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival, Eugene O’Neill Playwrights ‘Conference, Roundabout Underground, Lark Playwrights’ Week, EST / Youngblood and WP Theater. She has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and an MFA from the School of Drama at New School. She will earn her MD from the Icahn School of Medicine on Mount Sinai in May 2021.
Marwa Helal is the author of Invasive Species (Nightboat Books, 2019), Ante body (Nightboat Books, to be released in 2022), and winner of Bomb magazine’s 2016 Biennale Poetry Competition. She is also the author of the chapbook I was made to leave. I was made to return (No, Dear / Small Anchor Press, 2017) and has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA / NYSCA, Poets House and Cave Canem, among others. She was born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House Press, 2019), winner of the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award, ed The testimony of the kitchen owner (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman’s first short film (which she co-directed), Sam, Underground, profiled Sam Diaz, a teenage busker who would be the winner of American idolthe 18th season. She was the writer for that Sun from the bottom, a short documentary about the complicated legacy of the Malian emperor Mansa Musa. It was selected for inclusion in the Cannes International PanAfrican Film Festival and the New York African Film Festival. Osman’s directorial debut, The Ascendants, now streaming on Topic. She lives in New York.
Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. Xandria, the recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, where she research and compose a project book with poems and paintings that explore the black feeling and materiality. Their poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Their folk book Reasons to smoke won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest, judged by Claudia Rankine. Hull, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, is their first book. They are working on a non-fiction manuscript entitled Present as blue / aspiring to green about color theory, gender and ways of making it.