WHITING WINNERS ARE CHOSEN
By Julie Bosman
New York Times
Oct 26 2006
Five fiction writers, three poets and two playwrights have been
awarded $40,000 each as the winners of the annual Whiting Writers’
Awards for emerging authors.
The awards, which were presented last night at a ceremony in New York,
are given to writers early in their careers who possess exceptional
talent and promise. Past winners have included Jonathan Franzen,
Colson Whitehead, Jorie Graham and Sarah Ruhl.
A long list of prospective winners is selected by an anonymous group
of literary professionals; then a smaller committee of writers,
scholars and editors selects the 10 winners. The Mrs. Giles Whiting
Foundation has given the awards since 1985.
This year, the foundation chose winners from what it said was an
unusually diverse set of backgrounds, whose writing is "reflective of
their heritage and different sensibilities." Among them are a Navajo
poet, the daughter of an immigrant farm worker, an Armenian-American
novelist, a Chinese-born novelist, a Korean-American poet and the
son of an Irish dairy farmer.
The fiction winners were Charles D’Ambrosio, who is the author of
"The Dead Fish Museum," a short story collection published in April by
Alfred A. Knopf; Yiyun Li, a native of China whose collection of short
stories, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," was published by Random
House last year; Micheline Aharonian Marcom, who was born in Saudi
Arabia and now teaches at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., and whose
most recent novel is "The Daydreaming Boy," published by Riverhead;
Patrick O’Keeffe, who was born in Ireland, and is the author of "The
Hill Road," a collection of stories published by Viking last year;
and Nina Marie Martínez, the daughter of a Mexican-American farm
worker, and the author of a novel, "¡Caramba!"
from Knopf.
The winners for poetry were Sherwin Bitsui, who grew up in White Cone,
Ariz., on a Navajo reservation and is the author of "Shapeshift,"
a collection of poems from the University of Arizona Press; Tyehimba
Jess, whose first book, "Leadbelly" was published last year by Verse
Press; and Suji Kwock Kim, the author of "Notes >>From the Divided
Country: Poems," from Louisiana State University Press.
The playwrights honored by the Whiting Foundation are both residents of
New York: Bruce Norris, the author of the play "The Pain and the Itch,"
which just concluded a run at Playwrights Horizons, and Stephen Adly
Guirgis, an actor and playwright whose "Last Days of Judas Iscariot"
and "Our Lady of 121st Street" were among several plays presented by
the LAByrinth Theater Company, of which he is a member.
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