Joshua Bennett
Jordan E . Cooper
Steven Dunn
Tope Folarin
Donnetta Lavinia Grays
Marwa Helal
Sarah Stewart Johnson
Sylvia Khour y
Ladan Osman
POETRY AND NONFICTION
DRAMA
FICTION
FICTION
DRAMA
POETRY
NONFICTION
DRAMA POETRY
Xan Forest Phillips POETRY
INTRO DUCTION BY Elif Batuman
Peter Pennoyer, President
John N. Irwin III, Treasurer
Amanda Foreman
Kumar Mahadeva
Jacob Collins
Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary
TRUSTEES EMERITI
Antonia M. Grumbach
Robert M. Pennoyer
Kate Douglas Torrey
The Whiting Foundation provides support for writers and scholars who astonish us by expanding the boundaries of art and understanding. Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The awards are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.
The Foundation invites nominators from across the country whose work brings them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent to propose a single candidate each. The pool of nominators changes annually, and has included writers, professors, editors, agents, critics, booksellers, artistic directors of theaters, dramaturges, and directors of literary festivals. Winners are chosen by a selection committee composed of a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors appointed every year by the Foundation. By tradition, nominators and selectors serve anonymously to allow them complete freedom in choosing the strongest candidates. Whiting winners have gone on to receive numerous prestigious fellowships and other awards, and their work has shaped and advanced literature in this country over the past three and a half decades.
The Foundation’s other programs in support of literature include the Creative Nonfiction Grant to enable the completion of deeplyresearched works in progress written for a general audience, and the Literary Magazine Prize, which celebrates the determined and devoted publications that nurture new writers. The Foundation also supports the humanities with the Public Engagement Programs, for faculty who are undertaking projects to infuse the humanities into public culture at the local and national level, 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.
Why does a person become a writer: self-expression or communication? When I was growing up, there was a huge chasm between the two, and not much of a third path. I was already trying to decide: was I going to be an art-for-art’s-sake asshole staring, as seemed anatomically plausible at the time, into my own navel; or a craven, truckling sell-out to The Man? The 1990s were a great time for self-hatred, and for hatred of others, which was considered a form of authenticity.
My first break as a writer came in 2005. I was a grad student in California. The editor of The New Yorker, having read something I had written in n+1, invited me to “pitch” him a story. I didn’t know what pitching was. I ended up writing a profile of my Thai kickboxing teacher. Afterwards, I got a few emails from agents, asking if I was thinking about writing a book. Was I thinking of writing a book? Why yes, on my tenth birthday, I had cried because I had been alive for a decade but hadn’t yet written a book. By 2006, I was twenty-nine, which seemed incredibly old. But finally someone was going to help me write a book!
The book I wanted to write at that point was a novelistic retelling of Dostoevsky’s Demons set in a Stanford-like graduate literature department. Nobody thought this was a good idea. Every agent I talked to said
that my first book should be nonfiction, since I had written nonfiction for The New Yorker. It became clear that the thing that was a big deal wasn’t me but The New Yorker. One agent told me in a kind voice that my second book could be a novel about depressed graduate students. I ended up publishing my first book at age 32, for an advance in the midfour figures. I had just gone through a terrible breakup and, not unrelated, had racked up a medical bill significantly larger than my book advance. I was sure I was going to starve to death, a snob who was out of touch with what anyone else cared about. That’s when I found out I had received a Whiting Award, and a new way opened up between selfexpression and communication. Some body of people was investing in my self-expression—because it had communicated something to them. Looking back at that time, and at the conversations I had with agents, the thing that most strikes me is how young and afraid we were: me and the agents. And, I mean, were we wrong? Look around for five minutes. We weren’t wrong. That’s the great challenge: how to live in full knowledge of the terrors that surround us, yet not to act from a place of fear. Such advice is often easier to give than to receive—but receiving becomes a lot easier if it’s backed by a substantial check. What a treat for me, as a dispenser of advice-adjacent statements! I wish courage and confidence to these ten extraordinary, socially critical, and formally inventive writers, as they set out on a journey of communicating to us by expressing their view of the world.
ELIF BATUMAN’S work has appeared in n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2010. Her first book, The Possessed (2010), a collection of comic interconnected essays about the pursuit of Russian literature, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her second book, The Idiot, was published by Penguin Press in 2017 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has been a writer in residence at Koç University in Istanbul, a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Sidney harman Writer-In-Residence at Baruch College, and she holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, and a 2010 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the role of air in African American letters. The people that could fly. Eric Garner. Christina Sharpe highlighting the link between anti-black racism and the weather. It bears remembering. For the legal studies scholar and foundational critical race theorist Derrick Bell, one of the first characteristics of the black utopia he describes in his classic vignette, “Afrolantica Awakening,” is that it is simply a place where we can breathe. A space of celebration and retreat, somehow flourishing both inside and beyond the constraints of the present order. The sanctuary; the dancehall; my grandmother’s salon, glistening at a distance. When we turn to the written page, where is Black life lived? Anywhere. Everywhere. Underwater, outer space, underground. Even where there is no air at all. We imagine it as if it were otherwise. We conjure a world that is worthy of us. And then we gather there: unbowed, unburied, unabashed in our joy.
with a line from Gwendolyn Brooks
Months into the plague now, I am disallowed entry even into the waiting room with Mom, escorted outside instead by men armed with guns & bottles of hand sanitizer, their entire countenance its own American metaphor. So the first time I see you in full force, I am pacing maniacally up & down the block outside, Facetiming the radiologist & your mother too, her arm angled like a cellist’s to help me see. We are dazzled by the sight of each bone in your feet, the pulsing black archipelago of your heart, your fists in front of your face like mine when I was only just born, ten times as big as you are now. Your great-grandmother calls me Tyson the moment she sees this pose. Prefigures a boy built for conflict, her barbarous
and metal little man. She leaves the world only months after we learn you are entering into it. And her mind the year before that. In the dementia’s final days, she envisions herself as a girl of seventeen, running through fields of strawberries, unfettered as a king -fisher. I watch your stance and imagine her laughter echoing back across the ages, you, her youngest descendant born into freedom, our littlest burden-lifter, world -beater, avant-garde percussionist swinging darkness into song.
JOSHUA BENNETT is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), and Owed (Penguin, 2020). He is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Bennett holds a PhD in English from Princeton University and an MA in Theatre 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, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ford Foundation, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. His next book of creative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.
ZAMATA: Free?
WOMAN: (To TV) Bitch said free.
ZAMATA: What free?
WOMAN: (To TV) What country?
NEWSWOMAN: Land of the free.
WOMAN: (To TV) What free?
ZAMATA: What land?
NEWSWOMAN: This land.
WOMAN AND ZAMATA: Has free?
NEWSWOMAN: We’re all free.
ZAMATA: To do what?
NEWSWOMAN: Be free.
ZAMATA: Says who?
NEWSWOMAN: The free.
ZAMATA: Didn’t you report on the Damien Martin shooting?
WOMAN: She did! (To Trisha) They’re talking about your man over here, girl.
NEWSWOMAN: Yes.
ZAMATA: Was he free?
NEWSWOMAN: Yes.
WOMAN: (To TV) To die! They killed his ass too.
DAMIEN: Another way is coming!
TRISHA: Would you stop?
WOMAN: (To Trisha) What? He dead ain’t he?
DAMIEN: I’ll stop when you listen. I know you feel what’s right.
ZAMATA: And what about that woman they strangled last night?
WOMAN: Was she free?
NEWSWOMAN: Yes.
ZAMATA: And the baby they slaughtered last week?
NEWSWOMAN: Who is ‘They’?
WOMAN: They!
TRISHA: Them.
ZAMATA: The land.
TRISHA, ZAMATA AND WOMAN: The free
From Ain’t No Mo’
JORDAN E. COOPER is an Obie Award-winning playwright and performer who was most recently chosen to be one of OUT Magazine’s “Entertainers of the Year.”
Last spring’s run of his play Ain’t No Mo’, which was a New York Times Critic’s Pick, sold out. Jordan created a pandemic-centered short film called “Mama Got a Cough” that’s been featured in National Geographic and was named “Best Theater of 2020” by The New York Times. He is currently filming The Ms. Pat Show an R-rated ‘old school’ sitcom he created for BET+ which will debut later this year. He can also be see as Tyrone in the final season of FX’s Pose
Grandma thinks I’m her husband again. He died before I was born. She says to me, Remember when you came home from the mines all dirty and took me dancin. Yeah, I say, we had big fun. And that one gal, she says, whats her name, you know, that slew-footed heffa, the one starin at you. Aw cmon now, I say, that was nuthin, you know I only got eyes for you.
Grandma slips back in. She says, Boy, you wash them dishes yet. I was just about to, I say. Well what you waitin on. She changes the channel to Wheel of Fortune and solves a puzzle before I do, and before the people on the show do. Them some slow-ass folks on that show, she says. A commercial comes on. She looks at me. That was a real nice date, huh, dontcha remember.
I wasnt dirty I tell you that. I got off of work, came home, cleant myself up, and put on one of them nice suits, a real nice one. I told her to put on her dancin shoes cuz we was gonna hit the town. Now I aint never been the dancin type, but after I had me a few whiskies I shonuff cut a rug that night. I got to twirlin her round with one finger. Beige dress flutterin all over the place, showin them pretty legs. Boy I tell ya, that was a good night.
Grandma is too old to wipe her own butt. Last week when I was wiping her butt, she slipped out again. Who the fuck are you touchin my ass, she said. Like usual I was holding her arms with one hand while wiping her with the other. She started hitting me and trying to roll off her potty chair. My hand slipped down and shit smeared my forearm.
Get the fuck off me, she said. The best thing to do is wait until she slips back, so I walked to the bathroom to wash my arm and hand. I walked back to the room and she was still sitting on the potty chair. Its you again, she said, dear God, please help.
I told you we was gonna find a nice church in West Virginia once we got settled. I know the churches aint like the ones back home in Louisiana, but theyll do, baby. The mines payin me good, you makin some good friends, plys we got all these damn kids runnin around here. We gonna be alright.
Grandma finally called for me. I walked into the room and she said, would you mind helping me please, I had a little accident. I started wiping her, but the shit had dried a little and the toilet paper kept crumbling off. I soaked a washrag with warm water and soap. Thank you, she said, it must be something I’m eating thats making me mess all over myself. She farted. And started laughing. Thats enough gas to put in that car out there, she said.
Wheel of Fortune comes back from commercial. After every plate I wash I turn and look at Grandma. As long as I can see her looking up like she is thinking I think she is present. As long as I can hear her calling out an R or S or T or L or N or E, I think she is present. Buy a vowel, she says. She’s still here. Buy another vowel, she says. She’s still here.
From Potted Meat
STEVEN DUNN aka Pot Hole (cuz he’s deep in these streets) is the author of two novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press: Potted Meat (2016) and water & power (2018). Potted Meat was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists, and adapted as a short film, The Usual Route, by Foothills Productions. The Usual Route has played at the LA International Film Festival, Houston International Film Festival, and others. He was born and raised in West Virginia and teaches in the MFA programs at Regis University and Cornell College.
Tayo and I learned early on that all junkyards are basically the same. Dad had been taking us to junkyards all over Utah since we were toddlers, and we’d grown accustomed to the sights. At the front of the entire mess is a shack that’s supposed to serve as an entryway, checkout counter, and, depending on the whims of the owner, a bar as well.
Inside the shack there are car parts strewn all over the place: exhaust pipes on the counter, alternators and radiators spread across the floor, license plates everywhere. At the back of the shack there’s a door that leads to the junkyard, a gate to another land.
For each junkyard is like an unexplored planet. The terrain is always unfamiliar; the air barely breathable. There are craters everywhere, and my father moves forward carefully, scouting the path ahead before calling back telling us it’s okay to follow. Every junkyard looks like the site of a massive industrial explosion, the secret innards of various contraptions laid out for us to see, while we roam about like postapocalyptic scavengers searching for the parts that will make our dying car go.
There wasn’t much scavenging on this visit, though. Dad woke Tayo and me before dawn on the first day of our summer vacation and we drove to the Hartville Junkyard in our new ice cream truck. He asked the man behind the desk to follow us, and we walked through the industrial rubble until we came upon a long, sleek-looking freezer. Dad pointed at it.
“This is the one I want. How much?”
The man wheezed in response. “For this? This is top of the line, yes, sir. This’ll probably run you about . . . oh, I’d say about two-hundred fifty dollars.”
“But it doesn’t work,” my father replied flatly.
“Don’t matter. She’s a looker. I could get someone to come out here and pay three hundred for her.”
Back and forth they went until they settled on a price. One hundred
eighty-five dollars, and the man threw in a carburetor for free. Dad laughed long and hard after the man left to draw up our receipt.
“See? What did I tell you? I drive the best bargains in all of Utah!”
We returned home with the freezer in the back of the truck, and Femi joined us in cleaning it. Femi still had a thick Nigerian accent then, and I couldn’t decide if I liked him or not. This was the era when Tayo and I were basically the same person—same speech patterns (a solid middle-American accent spackled with the occasional Nigerianaccented phrase), same walk (a loping, confident gait that we’d adapted from our father’s), and we each possessed a similar propensity for attracting occasional trouble (for various things, but we both excelled at watching television when there were dishes that needed washing). Femi’s younger than Tayo and me, but he was our stepmother’s oldest, and back then he carried himself like a kid with responsibility. I couldn’t tell if he was acting perfect on purpose.
When we finished Dad told us to transfer a few boxes of ice cream from the freezer in the garage to the freezer in the truck. We did as we were told, and then Femi asked him how the ice cream would stay cold since the freezer didn’t work. Dad turned around in his seat.
“Why don’t you guys trust me? I have everything covered. Are you finished?”
We nodded and Dad immediately put the truck into reverse. From A Particular Kind of Black Man: A Novel
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 named to the 2014 Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. A Particular Kind of Black Man is his first book.
Eyes widen as we walk the streets of this shiny unfamiliar. And Ohhs and so many Ahhs.
What’s that moment when your spirit finally sees what your children see in you?
Hero. Protector. Smartest person in the room. And that wealth of responsibility and expectation washes over you... in fear. I never knew I could be as big as y’all imagined me to be. We walked the length of this town like to have all y’alls hope pressed into my chest. A hope we didn’t think possible.
A still could be?
A better than?
And like those new gleaming buildings, that change came gunning for us too.
Here come a, “Man, we looking fit today, y’all!”
As we turned to see suited up, dressed to the nines and church hats beaming. Seersucker, loafer, high heeled and high steppin’ all. All shades of royal set into our gaits. Here come a, “Man! I could get used to this!”
CAUSE’ GOLD IS ALL THE RAGE
YES, GOLD IS ALL THE RAGE NOW GOLD IS ALL THE RAGE NOW
AM I A KING AM I?
We all skip hop skip down the street. Like how we guess easy moments to be. Borrowed images of hope from some film we seen as kids maybe? Smiles curled. Sight sharpened. Here come a, “When I step foot in my new house...”
Here come a, “Can’t nobody tell me nothin!”
Here come a, “You ain’t ate no pies like the pies I’m ‘bout to bake from the fruit in my orchard, baby!” Here come, “Just watch me stunning in that new car. Crusin’ like what!”
Here come a, “Imma be the person I wished I could be with this new money way of living.”
AM I A KING
AM I A KING
Our imaginations set us into motion. The months pass. And gold becomes a throwaway thing like water, air or that morning kiss goodbye. We don’t even notice the unusual unusualness of it. Easy from a faucet easy.
THE DAYS MIGHT STILL PASS BY THE DAYS THEY DO GO BY TIP OF THE HAT HELLO GOODNIGHT THEY STILL PASS BY THE DAYS... BUT THIS TIME THERE’S A GLANCE A
(FOR ME) IT’S ALL WORTH IT.
And every day there’s you. Come to me. Asking me for a little blessing here and there. Lay a hand on a new baby’s head.
Here come me saying, “Well, now, you wanna see if Cooper’s got that steed ready for breeding come May.”
Here come me saying, “Ain’t nothing the two of you can’t work out. Love will find a way.” Here come me saying, “Sell ‘em for about five cents cheaper. Seem fair enough. She’s you neighbor. Keep her.”
Admiration. Respect.
WAS IT WORTH IT?
Real friendship... AM I A KING AM I A KING
How high? How high? How high can a man be? Life saver y’all say. Statue center of town. Of ME.
AM I A KING
Townsquare. Pageantry! Music! And favorite color painted faces. And all
on this day to celebrate our storied walk into this...newness. Feasts of fruits without a blemish.
And as the wine flows My speech goes...
A town ain’t nothing but history waiting for future! And we turned our future to good that day.
Here come a, “Yes. Yes. You bettah preach, now. You bettah go on! What you say!”
Towns are built by its people. That’s you. And that’s the person to ya side.
Here come a “Yes. Yes!”
I’m talking ‘bout a kind of joyful building. One that lessens the divide Between us. ‘Cause between us... That joyful building Is us building joyfulness from the inside.
And that edifice? It don’t just stand on joy. It stands on our duty to one another. An edifice built on how we call each other sister And how we call each other brother.
From Where We Stand
DONNETTA LAVINIA GRAYS is a Brooklyn-based playwright who proudly hails from Columbia, SC. 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 Is Dying. Donnetta is a Lucille Lortel, Drama League, and AUDELCO Award Nominee. She is the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwright Award, National Theater Conference Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, Lilly Award, and Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award. She is the inaugural recipient of the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. She is currently under commission from Steppenwolf, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, WP Theater, and True Love Productions.
poem to be read from right to left language first my learned i second
see see for mistaken am i native go i everywhere *moon and sun to ل letter the like lamb like sound fox like think but recurring this of me reminds chased being dream circle a in duck duck like goose no were there but children other of tired got i number the counting words english of to takes it in 1 capture another // *
poem for palm pressed upon pane
i am in the backseat. my father driving. from mansurah to cairo. delta to desert, heliopolis. a path he has traveled years before i was born. the road has changed but the fields are same same. biblical green.
hazy green, when i say: this is the most beautiful tree i have ever seen. and he says, all the trees in masr are the most beautiful. this is how i learn to see. we planted pines. four in a row. for privacy. for property value. that was ohio. before new mexico. before, i would make masr my own. but after my mother tells me to stop asking her what is wrong whenever i see her staring out of the living room window. this is how trauma learns to behave. how i learn to push against the page. i always give hatem the inside seat. so he can sleep. on the bus. his warm cheek against the cold window. when i am old enough to be aware of leaving. it is raining hard. 5000 miles away, there is a palm. in a pot. its leaves pressed. skinny neck bent. a plant seeking light in an animal kingdom.
From Invasive species
MARWA HELAL is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and Ante body (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2022), and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She is also the author of the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2017) and has been awarded fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA/NYSCA, Poets House, and Cave Canem, among others. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Mars, after all, is only our first step into the vast, dark night. New technologies are paving the way for life-detection missions to the far reaches of our solar system, to the moons of the outer planets, far from what we once considered the ‘habitable zone.’ To worlds that hold stacks of oceans amidst shells of ice, floating like a layer cake. That spew out jets of briny water through cryovolcanoes. That have pale hills and dark rivers and hydrocarbon rain. And then there are also the planets around other stars. There could be as many as forty billion planets that could support life in the Milky Way alone, belted with moons and moonlets — potentially an entire solar system for every person on Earth. The idea of knowing these places intimately, of one day touching their surfaces, may seem ludicrous. The universe has a speed limit — it’s slow, and these worlds are very far away. What could we ever know about them, besides a few details about their orbits, perhaps some spectrographic measurements of their atmospheres? They are points of light and shadow at the very edge of our sight, far beyond our grasp. Then again, that is exactly how Mars seemed only a century ago.
As much as Mars feels like a place we understand, a place like Earth, it is still the alien other. One of my favorite things inside the box, tucked in a bent folder, is a set of pictures that Opportunity took in 2010. All those years ago, it seemed like such a marvel that the rover was still working. No one would have dared to believe it would have thousands more sols of science. The dust was building, the power dropping. It had been traversing the planet for six years and was already long past its ninety-day expiration date. But then a gust of wind whistled across Meridiani Planum and cleaned some of the fine particles off the solar panels. With the unexpected spike in electricity output, the team commanded the panoramic camera to take a series of pictures that could be strung together with time-lapse photography.
The flickering images captured by the rover are unforgettable. There, on an ancient plain near the equator of Mars, against an ochre sky on a dusty day, the sun is setting. A white circle of light is drifting down over the dark desert. The terrain is bare, and the sky is still in the half-light of dusk. And on the horizon, with the dust having scattered all the red light away, the sunset glows an eerie, baffling, incandescent blue.
The color makes no sense. It rattles the mind. It rips at the seams of the physical world. Scientifically, I understand it — the properties of the light, the microphysics of the system. There is no mystery to behold. And yet the mystery, like many others in our universe, is profound, nearly incomprehensible. That blue. So recognizable, yet so foreign. Shining in a halo around our shared star, calling us like a siren. From The Sirens of
SARAH STEWART JOHNSON grew up in Kentucky before becoming a planetary scientist. She now runs a research lab as a professor at Georgetown University and works on NASA missions. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her book, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, was selected as one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020.
TAROON
You don’t want me to go, is that it? You want me to stay?
AFIYA
Of course I want you to go. Don’t be stupid. You think I want you here?
TAROON
I can handle whatever they send, Afiya. Good, or bad, or nothing.
AFIYA
Nothing! Exactly.
I hate it, seeing your hope when you check for messages. Watching it crack when there’s nothing. There’s always nothing.
TAROON
Until one day, there’s something.
AFIYA
We repair that box and you won’t have an invitation to America. Just a message from Jeff.
TAROON
Jeff is my friend.
AFIYA
Jeff is not your friend. Jeff got to go home to America. Jeff abandoned you.
TAROON
Jeff didn’t abandon me. Listen, Afiya.
America, their word is good, okay? So it takes some time, it takes some time.
AFIYA
He fills your head with dreams. I don’t like it.
TAROON
You know what Jeff and I went through together.
AFIYA Yes, yes.
TAROON
You’ve seen in my folder.
He pulls out a binder from under the floor couch. As he opens it:
AFIYA Taroon.
TAROON
All the letters he had them write me. Taroon translated for us here— Taroon came under fire there—
Taroon is a strong man— Brave man—
AFIYA
Repetitive man, I have heard this before, Taroon. Please, you are making my head hurt.
He puts the binder away.
TAROON
They will get me this visa, I know it. They will.
For me, for Bibi, for our son. Jeff promised.
AFIYA (Absently)
Yes, of course. Jeff promised.
Taroon is still restless. He watches her sew.
TAROON
Four months and suddenly this place seems so small.
AFIYA It is small.
…
Drink your tea, Taroon.
From Selling Kabul
SYLVIA KHOURY is a New York-born writer of French and Lebanese descent. Her plays include Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power Strip (LCT3), Against the Hillside (Ensemble Studio Theater) and The Place Women Go. She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center, Williamstown Theater Festival, and Seattle Repertory Theater. Awards include the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and Jay Harris Commission and a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents/ Hatcher Awards. She is a member of EST/ Youngblood and a previous member of the 2018–2019 Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop at 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 Theater Underground, Lark Playwrights’ Week, EST/Youngblood, and WP Theater. She holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the New School for Drama. She will obtain her MD from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in May 2021.
Don’t turn a scientific problem into a common love story.
—Solaris (1972)
How can I fail outside and inside our home? I decay in our half-life. How can I fail with my body? How do I stay alone in this half-life?
I started a ghazal about my hope’s stress fracture. I require rest from your unfocused eyes, my heat, which is becoming objective and observable. A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words: bray, flay, array.
They relate to farms, decaying things, gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it. Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying.
You don’t try to braid me together.
You don’t notice a tomcat wiggling his hind legs, ready to gather all my fabric, his paws over my accidental tassels.
I’ve learned how to be appropriate sitting on my hands on the couch, not allowed to touch you.
“Sex?” you say, like I asked you to make a carcass our shelter.
I don’t recount my dreams to you because you’re insulted in most of them. Remember when I asked you to break into a building?
“Let’s have an adventure, any.”
I dreamed another man was taking me into a locked school.
“Let’s go,” he said. No face, his hand straight behind him. He was wearing a black peacoat. Many men wear black wool coats. You have one. Hell, I have one. I may have been leading myself.
“How long will you live this half-life?” my mother asks during a phone call when, so absent of any particular emotion, I couldn’t catch my breath. She thought I was upset, losing my temper in the street. It’s months later, and when we talk she says, “I was so happy today. Does that make sense? And here I am, sleeping on a bed older than your baby sister.”
I’m not sure what bothers me but my voice gets low and I repeat myself.
I raise and drop my palate without sound.
“Good-night,” we say, each with something unaddressed, without allay.
I try to remember half-lives, learned in science rooms, air dense with iron, vinegar. The process of dating old bones, old stones. Unstable nuclei, decay by two or more processes. Exponential death, exponential halving of a life. My mother has given me something to pursue and solve.
I study the internet:
“The biological half-life of water in a human being is about 7 to 14 days, though this can be altered by his/her behavior.”
This makes me want to fall asleep in the bathtub. In this house, it’s how we escape each other, where we find another warm body, moisture, work a sweat on our brows.
I search doubling time, a related term, because I hate feeling fractioned.
Kitchens, bowls of water steaming under dough: How long will it take to grow to twice its size? Depends on rack placement, heat of the water, type of bread, whether the house is humid. This house is only humid in the bathroom, after a long soak with the door closed. Or else, in summer. But it’s winter and a long time before our flesh can rise and get sticky in hands, on counters, in a proper resting place.
LADAN OSMAN is the author of Exiles of 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 fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman’s first short film (co-directed), Sam Underground, profiled Sam Diaz, a teenage busker who would become the 2020 American Idol. She was the writer for Sun of the Soil, a short documentary on the complicated legacy of 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, is streaming now. She lives in New York.
From Exiles of Edenat first only the rivers and I wept for you in your journey, like the waters’ from tropical interiors, to the estuary slap of the ocean’s cupped hands
and then your absence became religion as easily as creating meaning from loss of limb, you fell into crates that rustled from within to the tune of the wind’s phantom chorale
Sex Dream in the Key of Aporia
I half-wake in sudor, queer vernacular forgotten in the sinew of sleep. Wetted by a man whose saunter turns my breed diaphanous,
I fasten myself to his shared anatomies while he ascribes me to the shades of children we’d make.
Sex, my choice harness for affection, I falter before unreining curiosity. Trans time and space,
I follow the russet roads inside myself, Accra lanced into my neural system still. My intra-continent sweats through shirts, and drinks stout, though it tastes of displacement.
I still have a penchant for what misconstrued me, to live among kin in exclusion. Awake, I don’t conflate touch with knowledge,
so my projected selves approach the helm as nimbus parts me. Their mission is simple. I buck their tether
They tighten its hold.
from HULL
XAN FOREST PHILLIPS is a poet and visual arti st from rural Ohio. The reci pien t of the Judith A. Markowitz Award f or em erging writers, Xan has received f ellowships from Oberlin Colleg e, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Wi sc on sin Institute f or Creative Writing, and Brown U ni versity. Their poetry has b een pu blished in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Their chapbook Reasons for Smoking wo n the 2 016 Seattle Review C hapbook Contest judged by Claudia R ankine. HULL, the recipient of a 2020 Lambda Literary Award, is their f i r st b ook. They are working on a no nfic tio n m a nuscript titled Presenting as Blue / Aspiring to Green, ab ou t color theory, ge nde r, and modes of making, and a boo k o f ekphrastic poetry about bl ack ch aracters in speculative televi si on shows.
Introduction copyright © 2021 by Elif Batuman.
Excerpt from “Where Is Black Life Lived?” by Joshua Bennett. Copyright © 2021 by Joshua Bennett. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Study of Human Life by Joshua Bennett. Copyright © 2021 Joshua Bennett. Forthcoming from Penguin Books. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Ain’t No Mo’ by Jordan E. Cooper. Copyright © 2021 by Jordan E. Cooper. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Potted Meat by Steven Dunn. Copyright © 2021 by Steven Dunn. Published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2016. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin. Copyright © 2021 by Tope Folarin. Published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Where We Stand by Donnetta Lavinia Grays. Copyright © 2021 by Donnetta Lavinia Grays. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Invasive species by Marwa Helal. Copyright © 2021 by Marwa Helal.
Published by Nightboat Books in 2019. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson, copyright © 2020 by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Selling Kabul by Sylvia Khoury. Copyright © 2021 by Sylvia Khoury. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Exiles of Eden by Ladan Osman. Copyright © 2021 by Ladan Osman. Published by Coffee House Press in 2019. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from HULL by Xandria Phillips. Copyright © 2021 by Xandria Phillips.
Published by Nightboat Books in 2019. All rights reserved.
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