2019 Whiting Award Winners Announced

This morning we received the good news on this year's crop of Whiting Award winners. For those unfamiliar: "The Whiting Awards, established by the Whiting Foundation in 1985, remain one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts ($50,000) to emerging writers, and are based on the criteria of early-career achievement and the promise of superior literary work to come." With that in mind, this year's winners are:

Kayleb Rae Candrilli, poetry
Tyree Daye, poetry
Hernan Diaz, fiction
Michael R. Jackson, drama
Terese Marie Mailhot, nonfiction
Nadia Owusu, nonfiction
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, fiction
Merritt Tierce, fiction
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, poetry
Lauren Yee, drama

NPR's Colin Dwyer featured the award and winners, writing:

Fair warning: It may be tough to find some of the 2019 Whiting Award winners on the shelves of your local bookstore. Most of the emerging writers have little more than a single widely published book to their name. A couple of them don't even have that.

But what the 10 new Whiting recipients lack in publishing credits and international awards, they more than make up for in talent and promise — at least, according to the prize's judges, who are bestowing $50,000 on each of them in the hopes of giving the winners "a first opportunity to devote themselves fully to writing, and the recognition has a significant impact."

Read more about the awardees at NPR and at the Whiting Foundation. Congrats to all!