The 2018 Whiting Award Winners

The ten winners of the 2018 Whiting Awards were announced tonight in a ceremony featuring a keynote by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison. Based on “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come,” the annual Whiting Award gives $50,000 to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. This year’s recipients are:

Fiction:
Patrick Cottrell, debut author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (Read The Millions‘ interview with Cottrell);
Brontez Purnell, author of Since I Laid My Burden Down
Weike Wang, debut author of Chemistry

Nonfiction:
Esmé Weijun Wang, author of the forthcoming The Collected Schizophrenias (Wang’s a Year in Reading alum)

Nonfiction/Poetry: 
Anne Boyer, author of Garments Against Women

Poetry:
Rickey Laurentiis, author of Boy with Thorn (Laurentiis’s work was featured in our literary Lent reader)
Tommy Pico, author of IRL (our review of Pico’s book-length poem)

Drama:
Nathan Alan Davis, playwright of Nat Turner in Jerusalem
Hansol Jung, playwright of  Cardboard Piano
Antoinette Nwandu, playwright of Pass Over