TheTenWinners of the 2022 Whiting Awards Claire Boyles FICTION Rita Bullwinkel FICTION Ina Cariño POETRY Anthony Cody POETRY Anaïs Duplan NONFICTION Alexis Pauline Gumbs NONFICTION Megha Majumdar FICTION Jesse McCarthy NONFICTION Nana Nkweti FICTION Claire Schwartz POETRY INTRODUCTION BY
André Aciman
Whiting Awards
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ABOUT THE WHITING FOUNDATION AND AWARD INTRODUCTION BY ANDRÉ ACIMAN
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Claire Boyles Rita Bullwinkel Ina Cariño Anthony Cody Anaïs Duplan Alexis Pauline Gumbs Megha Majumdar Jesse McCarthy Nana Nkweti Claire Schwartz
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THE WINNERS OF THE WHITING AWARD, 1985–2022
10 14 18 22 26 30 34 38 42
W H I TI NG F O U ND AT IO N T RUST E E S
Peter Pennoyer, President John N. Irwin III, Treasurer Amanda Foreman Kumar Mahadeva Jacob Collins Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary
TR U S TE E S E M E R IT I
Antonia M. Grumbach Robert M. Pennoyer Kate Douglas Torrey
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AB OU T T H E
Whiting Foundation and Award
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 decades. The Foundation’s other programs in support of literature include the Creative Nonfiction Grant to enable the completion of deeply-researched works in progress written for a general audience, and the Literary Magazine Prize, which celebrates the determined and devoted publications that nurture new writers. All the programs are intended to empower fresh thought and help bring it to the audiences who need it most.
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I N T R OD U CT I O N BY
André Aciman Write for yourself, they say. But that’s such nonsense. We wouldn’t know how. Even in our most private journals, either encrypted or kept under lock and key, we are not really writing for ourselves but for strangers who are so much like us that they might as well be altered selves bearing our first and last names. Why else do we spellcheck our diary entries, or make sure that our sentences are never fragmentary or written on the fly, but retain the accuracy and syntactic polish of what we mean to communicate? We know a lot about ourselves. We know our worst faults; but we don’t always like to be reminded of them. We may confide to our closest friends, to our partners, to our shrinks, but always with a touch of adornment, discretion, and adjustment, and when making our foulest and most shameful confessions, the cadence in our sentences is one of the many ways we burnish what we’re reluctant to fess up. But when we wake up in the middle of the night and know who we are, it’s an entirely different matter. We are horrified by what we’ve said, done, confessed, imagined, dreamt, and swear we’ll never write down. Still, we know that by the time we are fully awake the ugly truths we’ve dredged up at night will show themselves to be ore, not dross. The burnishing is art; the rest, as we soon realize, is incidental.
We alter experience not because we can’t live with it, but because we want to grasp it, and to do that we step back, not draw closer, which means writing as if for someone else, even if that someone else is us. We want to display what hurt us, or why we continue to be unhappy, or why we’re not always loved by those we love; but we need to do it on the slant, otherwise what we put down on paper is flat and lusterless—read: inauthentic. Art is what makes us authentic, not truth. We arrive at ourselves vicariously. Ultimately, we write not for others, not for ourselves, but for the person we will be, a sort of transfigured and enduring self. A diary entry that is hastily jotted down may be totally inscrutable in two days and certainly in two years. But one that is crafted is a letter to the person we’ll be one day and who would otherwise be unable to recall that special inflection on a beloved’s face when she’s just about to smile, the feel of the first gust of spring wind cutting through winter, the deafening rasp of crickets after we’ve put out the campfire. We write, not for the us writing things down, but for the us who hasn’t read them yet. I offer heartfelt congratulations to the ten winners of the 2022 Whiting Award. The world awaits your work.
was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me as well as of Out of Egypt and other novels, essay collections, and novellas. He received a Whiting Award in 1995. Aciman is the director of The Writers’ Institute and teaches Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. ANDRÉ ACIMAN
TheTenWinners of the
2022 Whiting Awards
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Claire Boyles FICTION
Ruth caught the sliver of new moon surrounded by wispy, long clouds. Ruth tried to name them. Cirrus? Cumulus? She couldn’t pin them down, and if the angels were gossiping with her dead ancestors about her current predicament, she didn’t want to know. The stars were coming in bright against the darkening skyline but seemed in motion, as if they were being drawn in real time by frantic Spirograph. Bad enough the other children had to be from Vegas. This baby would be from nowhere, a ghost-town baby, born on top of a fossil. She could not take back any of the decisions that had led her here. This is where she found herself, so this is where her baby would be born. “We have to get you to a hospital.” He didn’t look up. His concern was directed toward his boots. “There’s no time.” Ruth wriggled out of her nylons and dropped into a squat. She rested her forehead against the beam of the fossil pavilion. The pressure was somehow soothing, and it allowed her to balance without using her hands. She breathed into her body’s gathering, bearing down in her womb, trying to maneuver her rib cage lower, pulling her neck downward until it felt there was nothing at all between her chest and her chin. She tried to relax. She’d done this three times already. If she were in the hospital, she’d have a nurse to coach her. Here in the desert, she’d have to be her own nurse. At the peak of the contraction she reached her right hand up and into
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herself, screaming her wild misery into the night but willing her hand to be gentle, gentle, as she pulled, lightly, lightly, down on her child’s shoulder. The head cleared and the rest of the child dropped. Ruth held it with both hands, pushing her forehead into the beam so that she would not fall, would not lose her grip. Behind her, she heard a tremendous flopping thump. The boy was blue, wrapped in his own umbilical. Ruth made short work of unwrapping it, of clearing the clotted white mucus from the baby’s nose and mouth. She turned to ask Allen for his ranger’s shirt, for anything to wrap the child in, but Allen was still crumpled in a full faint. She took off her own state park sweater, wrapped her baby tight against the chill. When she heard his indignant, hungry cries, she put her back against the beam and started crying herself, shivering on the cool desert ground. The baby rooted against her belly as she waited to deliver the placenta. Beyond his newborn head, she could see the full glory of Orion’s Belt. Something in the center of the constellation was flashing on and off, or maybe it was distant lightning from a threatening storm, or it was just the way she saw everything differently through her tears.
From “Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars”
is a writer, teacher, and former sustainable farmer whose collection of stories, Site Fidelity, has been longlisted for the 2022 PEN America/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her writing has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and Boulevard, among others. She lives in Loveland, Colorado. CLAIRE BOYLES
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Rita Bullwinkel FIC TION
Mary read to Ainsley. “Don’t pause between the pages,” Ainsley instructed. “It interrupts the story. You have to read ahead a little or slow down your speech while you’re flipping, so you can say the sentence that straddles the pages without a noticeable break.” Mary read, “The ouroboros slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below at the same time.” “That’s right,” Ainsley said. “That makes perfect sense to me.” “Does it, though?” said Mary. “How can it mate with itself?” “It puts its tail in its mouth, that’s how.” “So, it metaphorically reproduces,” said Mary. “Don’t be dense, Mary,” said Ainsley. “It’s science.” Mary continued to read and Ainsley continued to listen. Mary was sitting cross-legged, balanced on a stool. Ainsley was lying flat on the wood floor, limbs and hair spread all around. They were both smart girls, but were young enough and pliable enough that it was not yet clear who was smarter. They were the only two people they knew who read a significant amount of books, so they read a great deal together, but they also took long walks in the forests that surrounded their houses and, during the summers, frequently swam and sunned themselves at the community pool.
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They thought of themselves as many things, but mostly as humans who other people seemed to identify as young women, which appeared to come with a great many problems, most of which they knew, but some of which they were still in the process of discovering. They had a private joke between the two of them that they were not girls, but, rather, vegetation, plants whose souls were mistakenly rerouted toward the incorrect vessels, and that is why sex made very little sense to them, and why it required a great deal of discussion. In line with their vegetal alter egos, the girls sometimes called each other Red and White, in reference to their favorite fairy tale, because Mary had the dark, tight curls like Rose Red and Ainsley had the pale, blonde, water-straight hair like Snow White. Also, they lived in a part of the country where one had to walk through the woods a great a deal to get anywhere, which seemed to them how things were in the story, and they were, always, traversing the pine-needle paths to get to each other’s houses, so it seemed like a good joke, but also something kind of nice to fantasize about, the two of them someday shape-shifting into flowers and ending up in the same bouquet. “How can something be above and below at once?” said Mary “If it’s inside something else,” said Ainsley. “Oh, I see.”
From “Arms Overhead”
is the author of the story collection Belly Up , which won the 2018 Believer Book Award. Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in Tin House , The White Review , Conjunctions, BOMB, Vice , NOON, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, Hawthornden Castle, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s and a Contributing Editor for NOON. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts. RITA BULLWINKEL
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Ina Cariño P O E TRY
Bitter Melon
balsam pear. wrinkled gourd. leafy thing raised from seed. pungent goya, ampalaya: cut & salt at the sink. spoon pulp from bumpy rind, brown half-moons in garlic & sparking mantika. like your nanay did. like your lola did. like your manang braving hot parsyak— you’ll wince. you’ll think of the taste of your own green body—mapait ang lasa. your sneer. masakit, dugo’t laman. it hurts, this smack of bitter. yes you’ll remember how much it hurts, to nick your thumb as you bloom heat in acid, sili at sukang puti—to grow up glowering in half-light—to flesh out & plod through your own grassy way, unfurl your own crush of vines. after you tip it onto a mound of steamed rice, as you chew,
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the barb of it will hit the back of your throat. look at yourself, square. you used to snarl at moths, start small blazes in entryways. woodchip fires, flaking paint. look, tingnan mo—see your lip curling in the glint of your bowl. unruly squash. acrid vegetable, you’ll flinch. you’ll want to see nothing, taste like nothing. but when you disappear your meal— when you choke on the last chunky morsel of rice—you’ll slurp thirsty for more—a saccharine life. huwag mo akong kalimutan, you’ll plead— taste me. taste me.
From Feast
holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Guernica, Diode, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. Ina is a Kundiman fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In 2021, Ina was selected as one of four winners of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. In 2019, they founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community. INA CARIÑO
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Anthony Cody P O E TRY
El Arpa, a Mexican Lynching, No. 53
“The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office.” — Jeff Sessions, former U.S. Attorney General, February 12, 2018 to the National Sheriffs’ Association
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The inheritance of the heir is never a dandelion disbursal. Scattershot. Floating beyond fences. Growing elsewhere.
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The inheritance of the elsewhere is a cave of collapse.
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The cave of collapse is work.
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The work is never inheritance of the heir’s or of the heir’s heir, as well as the heir’s heir’s heir.
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The inheritance of repetition is a soundless gavel buried in a shallow grave.
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The shallow grave is the redness of the bouquet a florist selects.
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The bouquet is a leaning into the quiet of a funeral.
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The quiet of a funeral is the Americas.
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The Americas is a platform, built by the settlers, sheriffs, and miners, for the lynching of the other.
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10. The lynching is in a vigilance committee of NAFTA, Operation Wetback, Maquiladoras, ICE, silences, the agricultural prison industrial complex, congressmen, and US presidents. 11. The silences is a gerrymandering of census data. 12. The census data is learning about the word incarceration through the storytelling project playing on public radio. 13. The incarceration is an ombligo of shirts in a forest of screams. 14. The ombligo is feeding again and never hungry. 15. The feeding is a church of excommunications inside a cage of teeth. 16. The cage of teeth is elected into office. 17. The elected are voting to eliminate whatever and everything. 18. The voting are no longer asking permission. 19. The permission is trafficking. 20. The trafficking is now asked to self-report. 21. The self-report is now asked to fill out a binary form in ink, online. 22. The binary is seeking a fourth option during the election. 23. The election is a wall.
24. The wall is a type of silence. 25. The silence is a type of America. 26. The type of America is in the arrest. 27. The arrest is defined as the cessation or stoppage of motion. 28. The cessation or stoppage of motion is the fabric veiling the artifice. 29. The fabric veiling the artifice is a factory of harps. 30. The factory of harps is a maker of a stringless harp. 31. The stringless harp is the mute progeny. 32. The mute progeny is now the inheritance of the heir.
From Borderland Apocrypha
is the author of Borderland Apocrypha, winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest and the 2021 American Book Award. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry, the PEN America/Jean Stein Book Award, and was longlisted for The Believer Editor’s Award. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California, he has lineage in the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. He collaborates with Juan Felipe Herrera and the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio and serves as an associate poetry editor for Noemi Press and a poetry editor for Omnidawn. ANTHONY CODY
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Anaïs Duplan N O N F IC TIO N
Growing up, I rationalized my father’s absence with ideas about gender norms. I thought that men, since they are more powerful, didn’t have to have any obligations to other people. I thought that I, too, wanted to not have obligations to other people. I internalized a concept of feminine love as that which either perfectly complements or perfectly emulates the love-object. Both versions are traps. In certain ways, having power projected onto you is as asphyxiating as having powerlessness projected onto you. The primary difference is that having powerlessness projected onto you puts you into danger that having power projected onto you doesn’t. Having obligations to other people is part of the beauty of being human, but our connections have to be chosen, not imposed. For a long time, I thought the only way to freely choose anything was as a man. The truth is, freedom is the most mundane thing imaginable but it’s also hard to locate and it’s rarely “pure.” All marginalized people inhabit two worlds at the same time: those of freedom and nonfreedom. Being unfree is different than being in bondage. In bondage, as in the case of enslavement, one’s body is owned by someone else. Being unfree, on the other hand, is what happens after the end of enslavement: one becomes an “emancipated” citizen in the society that used to enslave her and that is still built to do so—without a literal title on one’s body, but still with the power to destroy that body, threaten it, circumscribe it, categorize it, and imprison it. Should we, “post-bondage,” focus on the ways in which we’re free (free to move, free to buy, free to breathe) or the ways we’re not free (free to move but displaced and shuffled around, free to buy but within a capitalist system in which one used to exist as commodity, free to breathe but in especial danger at all times)? Neither. In order to locate liberation, one has to locate a third space. This alter-space is not “outside of,” “away from” or “other than” our present world. Instead, it is an intensification, or deepening, of mundane reality.
From “Making Use of the Mundane: Black Performance & Becoming”
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Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable. From “Paradigms for Liberation”
To propel myself is to stand for something else besides this world as a terrible, terrible place. To go further than my idea of myself extends. There is the happiness I feel within the limits of my current self-conception, then there’s the happiness of seeing my self-conception has fallen apart, yet another time. The former kind of happiness happens when reality aligns with my opinions about how the world ought to be. The latter happens when my beliefs about how the world ought to be are destroyed by an inescapable reality. The latter kind of happiness is always precipitated by intense fear. When this kind of world-shattering happiness takes place, beauty itself runs out and there’s only after-beauty. Language runs out and there’s after-language. After runs out— I was taught from a young age it was important to perform. As I work through my taboos, letting go of performance is most difficult. Even “forward” seems to fall apart. What I am is what is the future. From “Blackspace”
ANAÏS DUPLAN is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the newly released book I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at The New School, Bennington College, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 20172019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One.
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Alexis Pauline Gumbs N O N F IC TIO N
The scientific community believes that the Caribbean monk seal is extinct. The last verified sighting was in 1952, a couple of years before my father was born. Turns out, one of the very first things Columbus and them did when they got to the Caribbean was to kill monk seals. Six of them. Immediately upon arrival. They say the Caribbean monk seal, born Black and proud, was never afraid of the colonizers. And, in fact, they remained curious and calm. And the colonizers continued to use their own methods, which were fear-based and not calm at all. And genocidal. The oil in the blubber of Caribbean monk seals literally lubricated the machinery of the plantation economy. Without it nothing could function. It is said that some plantations in the Caribbean required hunts for monk seals every single night, so that the machinery for processing sugar cane could be smooth the next day. I cannot say that my father was a Caribbean monk, though there were a few transplanted and held in the New York Aquarium before he was born. They believe that, by the time the Caribbean monk seal was placed on the endangered species list, it was already extinct. I cannot say that Clyde Gumbs, who died of prostate cancer, diagnosed too late, was a Caribbean monk. I cannot say he was a monk at all. I can only say he had very few earthly possessions. And he wore the same outfit every day. I can say, yes, he had habits and rituals. I can say, when he lived in the
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Caribbean, he observed the sunrise and the sunset every morning and evening, squinting through a small digital camera. I can say, yes, he was curious and calm. And some people took advantage. I can say he was born Black, but I cannot say that he was never afraid. What he died from, the opposite of a healthcare system, a machine that turns Black death into sugar. Yes. I can say it is genocidal. Sometimes, usually in Haiti and Jamaica, people swear they see a Caribbean monk. The scientific community believes this is impossible, saying they are probably hooded seals out of range. But if you happen, by some miracle, to see him, will you tell him I say thank you for being Black and curious? Thank you for being calm and brave. And that I honor you for continuing to be who you were, no matter what they tried to turn you into, despite their hunting every night. And say I love you with a sweetness, not of sugar but of salt that won’t dissolve. I love you with a Black outliving empires in your name. Sun rise. Sun set.
From Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Dub: Finding Ceremony, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, and co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines. Her writing has appeared in publications including Make/Shift, Left Turn, The Abolitionist, Ms. Magazine, and more. She holds a PhD in English, African and African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University and is the co-founder of Black Feminist Film School, an initiative to screen, study, and produce films with a Black feminist ethic. In 2020, she was awarded the National Humanities Center Fellowship for her book-in-progress, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
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Megha Majumdar F IC TIO N
Even a future movie star is having to make money. One morning my sisters and I are spraying rose water in our armpits, braiding our hair, putting bangles on our arms, and together we are going to bless a newborn. The general public is believing that we hijras are having a special telephone line to god. So if we bless, it is like a blessing straight from god. At the door of the happy family, I am rattling the lock thuck thuck thuck. “Give, mother,” we are calling so that our voices can be heard deep within the big house. When nobody is coming, I am stepping back and looking up at a window. It is a big house, and the window is covered by a lace curtain. “Mother!” I am calling. “Let us see the baby, come.” Finally the door in front of us is opening, and the mother, wearing a nightie that goes only to her calves, her oily hair sticking to her scalp, her eyes looking like she has seen battle, is holding the baby and coming out. Poor woman is yawning like a hippopotamus. I am feeling that maybe I can make the mother cheer up, along with the baby. So I am taking the baby in my arms, inhaling the milk scent of his skin. My eyes are falling in love with those soft folds in his wrists, the plump inside of his elbows. The others are clapping above the baby, singing, “God give this child a long life, may he never suffer the bite of an ant! God give this child a happy life, may he never suffer a lack of grains!”
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The baby is looking surprised, with those big eyes. Maybe he is never coming out on the street before, never feeling the smoke and dust. For sure he is never seeing a group of hijras in our best clothes! He is screaming. His little mouth is opening to show pink gums and pink tongue, and he is screaming in my arms. He is a little animal. We are laughing. He is going to be fine, I am thinking, because he is having no defects, unlike myself. The mother is looking harassed, and taking the baby inside. We are waiting for the sound of a drawer opening, some cash being counted by mother and father. But what is this, she is going inside a room, where a tap is running and water is falling. From here, over all the sounds of the street, I am hearing one sound clearly: She is washing her hands. She is washing her hands of us. Meanwhile, the father is coming out in shorts and giving Arjuni Ma, our hijra house’s guru, three thousand whole rupees. He is sliding his glasses down his nose and looking at us from the top. One of my sisters is flirting with him for an old microwave or old TV. He is looking unhappy and pleading, “Where am I having so much, sister? Look at me. New baby and all.” Me, I am only trying to see what the mother is doing behind him, in the dark corridor, her hands so, so clean.
From A Burning
is the author of the New York Times Notable novel A Burning, which was nominated for the National Book Award, the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize and the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal. She is also the editor in chief at Catapult books. She grew up in Kolkata, India, and now lives in New York. A Burning is her first book. MEGHA MAJUMDAR
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Jesse McCarthy N O N F IC TIO N
Trap is what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Use of Bodies, “a form-of-life.” As it’s lived, the form-of-life is first and foremost a psychology, a worldview (viz. Fanon) framed by the inscription of the body in space. Where you come from. It never ceases to amaze how relentlessly black artists—completely unlike white artists, who never seem to come from anywhere in their music—assert with extraordinary specificity where they’re from, where they rep, often down to city, zip code, usually neighborhood, sometimes to the block. Boundedness produces genealogy, the authority of a defined experience. But this experience turns out to be ontology. All these blocks, all these hoods, from Oakland to Brooklyn, from Compton to Broward County, are effectively the same: they are the hood, the gutter, the mud, the trap, the slaughterhouse, the underbucket. Trappers, like rappers before them, give coordinates that tell you where they’re coming from in both senses. I’m from this hood, but all hoods are the hood, and so I speak for all, I speak of ontology—a form-of-life. The peculiar condition of being ceaselessly co-opted for another’s profit could arguably point to an impasse, to despair. But here’s the counter: the force of our vernacular culture formed under slavery is the connection born principally in music, but also in the Word, in all of its manifold uses, that believes in its own power. That self-authorizes and liberates from within. This excessive and exceptional relation is misunderstood, often
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intentionally. Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity. One result of this is that black Americans believe in the power of music, a music without and before instruments, let alone opera houses, music that lives in the kinship of voice with voice, the holler that will raise the dead, the power of the Word, in a way that many other people by and large no longer do—or only when it is confined to the strictly religious realm. Classical European music retained its greatness as long as it retained its connection to the sacred. Now that it’s gone, all that’s left is glassy prettiness; a Bach isn’t possible. Meanwhile, in the low life of blackness, there is a running fire that even in the midst of its co-optation exceeds the capacity of the system to soak it up. Mozzy is not a tragedian for the ages, but he is closer to the spirit of tragedy, as Sophocles understood it, than David Mamet. The people who make music out of this form-of-life are the last ones in America to care for tragic art. Next to the black American underclass, the vast majority of contemporary art carries on as sentimental drivel, middlebrow fantasy television, investment baubles for plutocrats, a game of drones.
From “Notes on Trap”
JESSE MCCARTHY is an assistant professor in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of the essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, a Time and Kirkus Reviews Book of the Year, and The Fugitivities, a novel. His writing on culture, politics, and literature has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, and n+1. He also serves as a contributing editor at The Point. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Nana Nkweti F IC TIO N
Night veils and reveals—her dark face tarted up with stars. Neonlit. Flossing. In alleys, on corners; users parlay with pushers. Johns politic with pimps, haggling for discount strange. Hip-hop and synthpop coat the stained-glass windows of Cream, NYC’s hottest new club—a deconsecrated church where bouncers in muscle tees play Saint Peter at the pearlies. Access granted. Or denied. Zeinab, the ladies’ room attendant, sees none of this from her perch on a high stool in the bathroom—its inky, lacquered black licorice walls shine like mirrors, yet reflect nothing. But it is her job to see. To be ever vigilant in attending to others. She offers a paper napkin, then a shoulder to lean on, to a teary-eyed girl mumbling about that motherfucker who thinks he’s the shit, but he ain’t shit. The aforementioned motherfucker is in the VIP stash, blitzed on Ace of Spades, grinding on some shorty’s phatty. At 3:00 a.m., he will wake up groggy, cuffed to a bedpost, wallet and Air King Rollie long gone, remembering his girlfriend—his ex now probably—had slapped him on the dance floor. Then stormed off to God knows where. Christ. Zeinab is holding said girlfriend’s hair back, a lace front weave unlacing in the steamy bathroom as the girl dry heaves into the sink. Preoccupied, she fails to see the woman in the purple-sequined mini stealing a fresh pack of spearmint and twentyeight dollars of her hard-earned tips from the countertop. Her dream fund money. Zeinab has purchased everything on offer herself: the candy and gum, mouthwash and mints, the combs, hair gels, scrunchies, safety pins, tampons, Band-Aids, Kleenex, lip gloss, snacks, stain sticks, a lint brush, aspirin, and antacids. Her tip jar is full to bursting with crumpled bills pulled from bras and teeny
44
bedazzled clutches. She is well paid and well regarded for her insightful attentions: her crazy glue fix-its for broken stilettos, plastic slippers ready should the bootleg shoe surgery go bust. There is lotion on hand, redolent of water lilies and lemongrass. An appletini air freshener she spritzes in each stall. A crystal garden of fragrances: designer perfumes in vintage atomizers sourced at the variety store off the subway stop in her hood. The first time she spritzed him with honeysuckle, her cousin’s friend Sa’id told her that her name, Zeinab, meant “fragrant flower” in Arabic. This she already knew but she allowed him his moment, smiling sweetly, rewarded when he leaned into the crook of her neck—close yet not quite touching, an innocent, air bisousbisous—inhaling deep. She laughed then, taking in his own scent— the honeysuckle, yes, but mixed with something native to him yet familiar, a heady musk that reminded her of evenings back home, lit by blazing stars and the blood orange embers of soft sissoo wood fires, burning bright. As a child, while her mother secreted away to their garden to ritually bathe her naked flesh in seasoned smoke, Zeinab dreamed of a different starlit haj, longing to steal away from home, cloak herself in men’s garb, shadow the steps of her nomadic Bororo distant cousins as they tended djafoun cattle in the highlands. Roaming and untethered, whiffs of their scent on the wind were intoxicating. “You smell like nighttime,” she told Sa’id. “Like freedom.” “Shukran,” he replied. “An oudh mixture my mother made before I came to America. ‘Let it always remind you of home,’ she told me. I dab it on my beard to remember where I come from.”
From “Night Becomes Us”
NANA NKWETI is the author of the story collection Walking on Cowrie Shells. An AKO Caine Prize finalist and alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross, and Clarion West, among others. She has studied international law and trained and practiced as a nurse, and is now a professor of English at the University of Alabama.
46
Claire Schwartz P O E TRY
Apples
The townspeople paste wax apples on the trees, glow shyly out their windows as the Dictator struts past the monument of his father strutting past nothing at all. Yesterday, the Dictator dressed the Butcher’s boy in the uniform of his own son. Today, at the orders of the Dictator, guards shot the boy. In the town of his childhood, the Curator is a tourist. He touches his mother with the language with which he does not touch his work. In the painting, bored bored Eve chomps on an apple. In the tongue of his work, he acquires her. At the banquet: music wrung from the townspeople’s anguish, pigs choked with apples. The meat in the soup is human meat. The Dictator’s rings are made of gold yanked from the teeth of corpses. The Censor bloats with what he knows. His sons bloom in neat rows. An orchard grows inside his wife. He prunes her on Sundays. Under the earth, the Butcher’s boy, laughing, eats an apple. The core rises, light with rot. The Dictator admires the fruit of his land.
48
Letter by Letter
In his office in the attic, in his favorite khaki pants, the Archivist carefully sets down the glass case of his body so as not to rattle the exhibit of his mind. He wears gloves to stroke the name on the envelope, the name written in a florid hand trained by long-ago love. To live among the dead, the Archivist thinks. His eyebrows do a little jig. With fingers strange to his wife, the Archivist traces the name of the street in the village that burned. The street wears the name of the flower the Archivist’s mother tucked behind her ear in a photograph languishing in a desk drawer. The Archivist carries his mind into each house. Here, the Cook makes love, his hand brushing flour against his boyfriend’s nipple. There, the Tailor’s satisfied song of scissors bisecting a ream of red. A girl whose mouth makes an O, around which chocolate makes another mouth, runs through the road. The road which runs through the Archivist’s blood. The girl is the Archivist’s grandmother only in that she is a story the Archivist tells himself about how he got here. Under an oak tree, two dogs fucking. The girl’s ice cream is melting. The Archivist’s mind is sticky with history. Of course, the village burns again. History is the only road that survives. Downstairs, the Archivist’s daughter is hungry. He restores the dead to their folders. To live! The girls’ wails rise through the house like smoke.
Preferential Treatment
The Censor uses the black crayon to eradicate sex. On payday, he takes his wife and son to Shake Shack. Whatever you want, the Censor says to his wife when she asks what she should have. The Censor crosses provide for your family off the list he keeps tucked in his billfold. To track the time, the Censor sings “You Are My Sunshine” twice while his son brushes his teeth. The boy shows the glass his shining mouthstones and growls. He is a bear. No, he is a boy. In the boy’s drawings, the zebras are purple and white. His mother hangs them on the fridge. What beautiful horses, the Censor says. His wife’s wit trembles, then ebbs. The children’s nails are clogged with black wax.
From Civil Service
is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service, forthcoming from Graywolf, and the culture editor of Jewish Currents. Claire’s writing has appeared in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Yorker online, Poetry Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. With Kaveh Akbar and Sarah Kay, she wrote a column for The Paris Review called “Poetry RX.” She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and Yale’s Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize and received her PhD from Yale. CLAIRE SCHWARTZ
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The Winners of the Whiting Awards 1985–2022
Raymond Abbott, Fiction, 1985
Anthony Carelli, Poetry, 2015
Aria Aber, Poetry, 2020
Ina Cariño, Poetry, 2022
André Aciman, Fiction, 1995
Hayden Carruth, Poetry, 1986
David Adjmi, Drama, 2010
Emily Carter, Fiction, 2001
Ellen Akins, Fiction, 1989
Joan Chase, Fiction, 1987
Daniel Alarcón, Fiction, 2004
Alexander Chee, Fiction, 2003
Jeffery Renard Allen, Fiction, Poetry, 2002 Dan Chiasson, Poetry, 2004 Mindy Aloff, Nonfiction, 1987
Don Mee Choi, Poetry, 2011
Diannely Antigua, Poetry, 2020
Paul Clemens, Nonfiction, 2011
Will Arbery, Drama, 2020
Anthony Cody, Poetry, 2022
Elizabeth Arnold, Poetry, 2002
Robert Cohen, Fiction, 2000
John Ash, Poetry, 1986
Christopher Cokinos, Nonfiction, 2003
Kirsten Bakis, Fiction, 2004
Clarence Coo, Drama, 2017
Catherine Barnett, Poetry, 2004
Jordan E. Cooper, Poetry, 2021
Clare Barron, Drama, 2017
Amanda Coplin, Fiction, 2013
Elif Batuman, Nonfiction, 2010
Leopoldine Core, Fiction, 2015
Jen Beagin, Fiction, 2017
Eduardo C. Corral, Poetry, 2011
Jo Ann Beard, Nonfiction, 1997
Patrick Cottrell, Fiction, 2018
Joshua Bennett, Poetry, Nonfiction, 2021
Mark Cox, Poetry, 1987
Mischa Berlinski, Fiction, 2008
Douglas Crase, Poetry, 1985
Ciaran Berry, Poetry, 2012
Justin Cronin, Fiction, 2002
Sherwin Bitsui, Poetry, 2006
Stanley Crouch, Nonfiction, 1991
Scott Blackwood, Fiction, 2011
Michael Cunningham, Fiction, 1995
Brian Blanchfield, Nonfiction, 2016
Michael Dahlie, Fiction, 2010
Judy Blunt, Nonfiction, 2001
Charles D’Ambrosio, Fiction, 2006
Anne Boyer, Poetry and Nonfiction, 2018
J. D. Daniels, Nonfiction, 2016
Claire Boyles, Fiction, 2022
Lydia Davis, Fiction, 1988
Courtney A. Brkic, Fiction, 2003
Nathan Alan Davis, Drama, 2018
Joel Brouwer, Poetry, 2001
Tyree Daye, Poetry, 2019
Jericho Brown, Poetry, 2009
Connie Deanovich, Poetry, 1997
Rita Bullwinkel, Fiction, 2022
Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Fiction,
Michael Burkard, Poetry, 1988
Nonfiction, 2013
Michael Byers, Fiction, 1998
Jaquira Díaz, Nonfiction, 2020
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Fiction, 2005
Hernan Diaz, Fiction, 2019
Ryan Call, Fiction, 2011
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Poetry, 2016
Sheila Callaghan, Drama, 2007
Trudy Dittmar, Nonfiction, 2003
Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Poetry, 2019
Matt Donovan, Poetry, 2010
Francisco Cantú, Nonfiction, 2017
Mark Doty, Poetry, 1994
52
Jennifer Dubois, Fiction, 2013
Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Drama, 2021
Bruce Duffy, Fiction, 1988
Lucy Grealy, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1995
Steven Dunn, Fiction, 2021
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Fiction, 2017
Pam Durban, Fiction, 1987
Elana Greenfield, Drama, Fiction, 2004
Stuart Dybek, Fiction, 1985
Linda Gregg, Poetry, 1985
Gerald Early, Nonfiction, 1988
Gordon Grice, Nonfiction, 1999
Russell Edson, Poetry, 1989
Virginia Grise, Drama, 2013
Kim Edwards, Fiction, 2002
Rinne Groff, Drama, 2005
Louis Edwards, Fiction, 1994
Paul Guest, Poetry, 2007
Erik Ehn, Drama, 1997
Stephen Adly Guirgis, Drama, 2006
Gretel Ehrlich, Nonfiction, 1987
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Nonfiction, 2022
Nancy Eimers, Poetry, 1998
Danai Gurira, Drama, 2012
Deborah Eisenberg, Fiction, 1987
Daniel Hall, Poetry, 1998
Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poetry, 2005
Lisa Halliday, Fiction, 2017
Jeffrey Eugenides, Fiction, 1993
W. David Hancock, Drama, 1998
Roger Fanning, Poetry, 1992
Kent Haruf, Fiction, 1986
Anderson Ferrell, Fiction, 1996
Michael Haskell, Poetry, 1999
Kathleen Finneran, Nonfiction, 2001
Ehud Havazelet, Fiction, 1999
Tope Folarin, Fiction, 2021
Terrance Hayes, Poetry, 1999
Ben Fountain, Fiction, 2007
Alan Heathcock, Fiction, 2012
Jonathan Franzen, Fiction, 1988
Marwa Helal, Poetry, 2021
Kennedy Fraser, Nonfiction, 1994
Amy Herzog, Drama, 2011
Ian Frazier, Nonfiction, 1989
Emily Hiestand, Poetry, 1990
Nell Freudenberger, Fiction, 2005
Rick Hilles, Poetry, 2008
Forrest Gander, Poetry, 1997
Lucas Hnath, Drama, 2015
Cristina García, Fiction, 1996
Eva Hoffman, Nonfiction, 1992
Madeleine George, Drama, 2016
Donovan Hohn, Nonfiction, 2008
David Gewanter, Poetry, 2002
John Holman, Fiction, 1991
Melissa James Gibson, Drama, 2002
Mary Hood, Fiction, 1994
Dagoberto Gilb, Fiction, 1993
Jay Hopler, Poetry, 2009
Samantha Gillison, Fiction, 2000
Michelle Huneven, Fiction, 2002
Aracelis Girmay, Poetry, 2015
Samuel D. Hunter, Drama, 2012
Jody Gladding, Poetry, 1997
Ishion Hutchinson, Poetry, 2013
Allison Glock, Nonfiction, 2004
Naomi Iizuka, Drama, 1999
Molly Gloss, Fiction, 1996
James Ijames, Drama, 2017
Rebecca Goldstein, Fiction, 1991
Major Jackson, Poetry, 2003
Allegra Goodman, Fiction, 1991
Michael R. Jackson, Drama, 2019
Jorie Graham, Poetry, 1985
Mitchell S. Jackson, Fiction, 2016
Tyehimba Jess, Poetry, 2006
Victor Lavalle, Fiction, 2004
Adam Johnson, Fiction, 2009
Andrea Lawlor, Fiction, 2020
Denis Johnson, Fiction, 1986
Amy Leach, Nonfiction, 2010
Jenny Johnson, Poetry, 2015
Li-Young Lee, Poetry, 1988
Sarah Stewart Johnson, Nonfiction, 2021 Suzannah Lessard, Nonfiction, 1995 R. S. Jones, Fiction, 1992
Dana Levin, Poetry, 2005
A. Van Jordan, Poetry, 2004
Mark Levine, Poetry, 1993
Dan Josefson, Fiction, 2015
Yiyun Li, Fiction, 2006
Rajiv Joseph, Drama, 2009
Ralph Lombreglia, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1998
Hansol Jung, Drama, 2018
Layli Long Soldier, Poetry, 2016
Cynthia Kadohata, Fiction, 1991
Ling Ma, Fiction, 2020
Agymah Kamau, Fiction, 2003
Nathaniel Mackey, Fiction, Poetry, 1993
Ilya Kaminsky, Poetry, 2005
Rosemary Mahoney, Nonfiction, 1994
Joan Naviyuk Kane, Poetry, 2009
Megha Majumdar, Fiction, 2022
Seth Kantner, Fiction, 2005
Terese Marie Mailhot, Nonfiction, 2019
Mary Karr, Poetry, 1989
Mona Mansour, Drama, 2012
Douglas Kearney, Poetry, 2008
Micheline A. Marcom, Fiction, 2006
John Keene, Fiction, Poetry, 2005
Ben Marcus, Fiction, 1999
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Poetry, 1996
J. S. Marcus, Fiction, 1992
Randall Kenan, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1994
Anthony Marra, Fiction, 2012
Brad Kessler, Fiction, 2007
Dionisio D. Martínez, Poetry, 1993
Laleh Khadivi, Fiction, 2008
Nina Marie Martínez, Fiction, 2006
Sylvia Khoury, Drama, 2021
Cate Marvin, Poetry, 2007
Alice Sola Kim, Fiction, 2016
Jesse McCarthy, Nonfiction, 2022
Suji Kwock Kim, Poetry, 2006
Shane McCrae, Poetry, 2011
James Kimbrell, Poetry, 1998
Tarell Alvin McCraney, Drama, 2007
Lily King, Fiction, 2000
Alice McDermott, Fiction, 1987
Brian Kiteley, Fiction, 1996
Reginald McKnight, Fiction, 1995
Matthew Klam, Fiction, 2001
John McManus, Fiction, 2000
Kevin Kling, Drama, 1993
James McMichael, Poetry, 1995
Wayne Koestenbaum, Nonfiction,
Scott McPherson, Drama, 1991
Poetry, 1994
Jane Mead, Poetry, 1992
Tony Kushner, Drama, 1990
Suketu Mehta, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1997
Natalie Kusz, Nonfiction, 1989
Morgan Meis, Nonfiction, 2013
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Ellen Meloy, Nonfiction, 1997
Mary La Chapelle, Fiction, 1988
Michael Meyer, Nonfiction, 2009
Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Fiction, 2010
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54
C. E. Morgan, Fiction, 2013
Darryl Pinckney, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1986
Wright Morris, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1985
Katha Pollitt, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1992
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Reinaldo Povod, Drama, 1987
Thylias Moss, Poetry, 1991
Padgett Powell, Fiction, 1986
Brighde Mullins, Drama, 2001
Stephanie Powell Watts, Fiction, 2013
Nami Mun, Fiction, 2009
Brontez Purnell, Fiction, 2018
Manuel Muñoz, Fiction, 2008
Hanna Pylväinen, Fiction, 2012
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Hugh Raffles, Nonfiction, 2009
Yxta Maya Murray, Fiction, 1999
Keith Reddin, Drama, 1992
Lawrence Naumoff, Fiction, 1990
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Nana Nkweti, Fiction, 2022
Roger Reeves, Poetry, 2015
Howard Norman, Fiction, 1985
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Nonfiction, 2012
Bruce Norris, Drama, 2006
Mark Richard, Fiction, 1990
Josip Novakovich, Fiction,
Atsuro Riley, Poetry, 2012
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Harriet Ritvo, Nonfiction, 1990
Sigrid Nunez, Fiction, 1993
José Rivera, Drama, 1992
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Lewis Robinson, Fiction, 2003
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Geoffrey O’Brien, Nonfiction, 1988
Rick Rofihe, Fiction, 1991
Chris Offutt, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1996
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Patrick O’Keeffe, Fiction, 2006
Jess Row, Fiction, 2003
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Nadia Owusu, Nonfiction, 2019
Russ Rymer, Nonfiction, 1995
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Lucy Sante, Nonfiction, 1989
Ann Pancake, Fiction, 2003
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Nonfiction, 2010
Suzan-Lori Parks, Drama, 1992
James Schuyler, Poetry, 1985
Elena Passarello, Nonfiction, 2015
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Danzy Senna, Fiction, 2002
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Tommy Pico, Poetry, 2018
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D. J. Waldie, Nonfiction, 1998
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Esmé Weijun Wang, Nonfiction, 2018
Jason Sommer, Poetry, 2001
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Anne Washburn, Drama, 2015
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Teddy Wayne, Fiction, 2011
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Charles Harper Webb, Poetry, 1998
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Kerri Webster, Poetry, 2011
Ruth Stone, Poetry, 1986
Joshua Weiner, Poetry, 2002
Patricia Storace, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1996
Timberlake Wertenbaker, Drama, 1989
Kelly Stuart, Drama, 2000
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Simone White, Poetry, 2017
Melanie Sumner, Fiction, 1995
Colson Whitehead, Fiction, 2000
Mary Swander, Nonfiction, Poetry, 1994
Marianne Wiggins, Fiction, 1989
Margaret Talbot, Nonfiction, 1999
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Lysley Tenorio, Fiction, 2008
Damien Wilkins, Fiction, 1992
James Thomas Stevens, Poetry, 2000
Claude Wilkinson, Poetry, 2000
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Fiction, 2019
Phillip B. Williams, Poetry, 2017
Clifford Thompson, Nonfiction, 2013
Greg Williamson, Poetry, 1998
LB Thompson, Poetry, 2010
August Wilson, Drama, 1986
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Tracey Scott Wilson, Drama, 2004
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Tobias Wolff, Fiction, Nonfiction, 1989
Christopher Tilghman, Fiction, 1990
John Wray, Fiction, 2001
Jia Tolentino, Nonfiction, 2020
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Peter Trachtenberg, Nonfiction, 2007
C. D. Wright, Poetry, 1989
Vu Tran, Fiction, 2009
Franz Wright, Poetry, 1991
Judy Troy, Fiction, 1996
Stephen Wright, Fiction, 1990
Tony Tulathimutte, Fiction, 2017
Lauren Yee, Drama, 2019
Genya Turovskaya, Poetry, 2020
Martha Zweig, Poetry, 1999
Jack Turner, Nonfiction, 2007 Mark Turpin, Poetry, 1997 Samrat Upadhyay, Fiction, 2001 Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Fiction, 2015 A. J. Verdelle, Fiction, 1996 Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Poetry, 2019 William T. Vollmann, Fiction, 1988 Ocean Vuong, Poetry, 2016
No award was granted in 2014
56 P E R M I S S I O NS Introduction copyright © 2022 by André Aciman. Excerpt from SITE FIDELITY: STORIES by Claire Boyles. Copyright © 2021 by Claire Boyles. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Excerpt from BELLY UP by Rita Bullwinkel. Copyright © 2016 by Rita Bullwinkel. Used by permission of A Strange Object. All rights reserved. Excerpt from FEAST by Ina Cariño. Copyright © 2022 by Ina Cariño. Used by permission of Alice James Books. All rights reserved. Excerpt from BORDERLAND APOCRYPHA by Anthony Cody. Copyright © 2020 by Anthony Cody. Used by permission of Omnidawn. All rights reserved. Excerpt from BLACK SPACE: ON THE POETICS OF AN AFROFUTURE by Anaïs Duplan. Copyright © 2020 by Anaïs Duplan. Used by permission of Black Ocean. All rights reserved. Excerpt from UNDROWNED: BLACK FEMINIST LESSONS FROM MARINE MAMMALS by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Copyright © 2020 by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Used by permission of AK Press. All rights reserved. Excerpt from A BURNING by Megha Majumdar. Copyright © 2020 by Megha Majumdar. Used by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. All rights reserved. Excerpt from UNDROWNED: BLACK FEMINIST LESSONS FROM MARINE MAMMALS by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Copyright © 2020 by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Used by permission of AK Press. All rights reserved. Excerpt from WHO WILL PAY REPARATIONS ON MY SOUL? by Jesse McCarthy. Copyright © 2020 by Jesse McCarthy. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
Claire Schwartz, “Letter by Letter, “Preferential Treatment” and “Apples” from Civil Service. Copyright © 2022 by Claire Schwartz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.
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Nana Nkweti, excerpt from “Night Becomes Us,” from Walking on Cowrie Shells. Copyright © 2021 by Nana Nkweti. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.
