Since 1985, every year the Whiting Foundation awarded $ 50,000 each to ten emerging writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Previous recipients of a Whiting Award include Colson Whitehead (2000), Alexander Chee (2003), Terese Marie Mailhot (2019) and Jia Tolentino (2020).
This year’s winners were announced on April 14 via a virtual ceremony and on Twitter and Facebook. Here they are!
Joshua Bennett is the author of three volumes of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), Guilty (Penguin, 2020), and To be a one-time property (Harvard University Press, 2020), who 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 earned a PhD in English from Princeton University and a master’s degree in theater and performance studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall scholar. He has received scholarships 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 artist who was recently named one of Out magazine’s entertainer of the year. Last year he sold out his play Is not no ‘, a critic of the New York Times. Jordan has created a short film called Pandemic Mom got cough which appeared in National Geographic and was named the best of 2020 by the New York Times. He is currently filming The me. Pat Show, a classic sitcom from old that he created for BET +, which starts later this year. He can also be seen in the final season of FX as Tyrone Set.
Steven Dunn, or Pot Hole (because he is deep in these streets), is the author of two novels by Tarpaulin Sky Press: Pot meat (2016) and Water & Power (2018). Pot meat was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists list, and adapted for a short film by Foothills Productions. The usual route, based on Pot meat, has starred at LA International Film Festival, Houston International Film Festival, and others. Born and bred in West Virginia, he teaches MFA programs at Regis University and Cornell College.
Tope Folarin is a Nigerian American author based in Washington, DC. He won the Caine Prize for Afrikaans writing in 2013 and was shortlisted again in 2016. He was also nominated to the Africa39 list of the most promising Afrikaans writers under 40 in 2019. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he obtained 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 do not cry, last night and the night before, laid to rest, the review or how you can eat your opposition, the new normal, en The Cowboy Dies. Donnetta has been nominated for Lucille Lortel, Drama League and AUDELCO Awards. She is the recipient of 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 assistant professor of planetary science at Georgetown University. A former Rhodes scholar and White House fellow, she earned her doctorate from MIT and worked at NASA spirit, Opportunity, en Curiosity rovers. She is also a visiting scientist at the Planetary Environment Lab at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Sylvia Khoury is a New York-born author of French and Lebanese descent. Her plays include Kabul sale (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power strip (LCT3), Against the Hillside (Ensemble Studio Theater), and The place where women go. She is currently commissioned by Lincoln Center, Williamstown Theater Festival and Seattle Repertory Theater. Awards include the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and the Jay Harris Commission and a quote of excellence from the Laurents / Hatcher Awards. She is a member of EST / Youngblood and a former member of the Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop 2018–2019 at the Lark and the WP Lab 2016–2018. 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 the New School. She will obtain her doctorate at 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, coming in 2022), and winner of the Bomb Poetry Biennial Poetry Competition 2016. She is also the author of the main book I’m made to go I’m made to return (No, Dear / Small Anchor Press, 2017) and has been awarded scholarships from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA / NYSCA, Poets House and Cave Canem, among others. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles from Eden (Coffee House Press, 2019), winner of the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. She has received scholarships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman’s first short film (which she composed), Sam, Underground, profiled Sam Diaz, a teenage bus driver who is the winner of American Idol‘s 18th season. She was the author for Sun from the ground, a short documentary about the intricate legacy of the Malian emperor Mansa Musa. It was selected to be included in the Cannes International PanAfrican Film Festival and the New York African Film Festival. Osman’s debut as a director, The Ascendants, now streaming on Topic. She lives in New York.
Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xandria, has received scholarships 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 they explore and compose a project book with poems and paintings exploring black feeling and materiality. Their poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Their general ledger Reasons for smoking won the Seattle Chapter Book Competition judged in 2016 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 / aspirant to green about color theory, gender and ways of making.