Congratulations to the 2017 Whiting Honorees

Last night, the Whiting Foundation announced the recipients of this year's Whiting Awards. At the Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring sheds a little light on the occasion. This is the third consecutive year that the Paris Review has announced the names of the winners on the blog. Each year, the Whiting Awards bestow $50,000 upon writers based on their "early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come." The honorees hail from numerous genres, from drama to poetry to nonfiction and fiction. This year's recipients for poetry are Simone White and Phillip B. Williams. More:

For the third consecutive year, The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the ten winners of the annual Whiting Awards. Drum roll, please—they are:

Clare Barron, drama
Jen Beagin, fiction
Francisco Cantú, nonfiction
Clarence Coo, drama
Kaitlyn Greenidge, fiction
Lisa Halliday, fiction
James Ijames, drama
Tony Tulathimutte, fiction
Simone White, poetry
Phillip B. Williams, poetry

We’re proud to have selected writing from all the Whiting honorees, too. Click each name above to read on—you’ll discover work by some of the best writers of their generation, astonishing in its breadth and depth. If you need further evidence of their creativity, here’s a random profusion of the nouns they use: blue cheese, lotion, pantslessness, dark desert nights, the subjunctive, spoiled-milk breath, “Q-TIPS!!!”, infrastructure, pepperoni-size ear gauges, black-ass tumbleweed, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and one Mr. Disgusting. This Thursday, March 23, New Yorkers can hear all of these wonders firsthand, as the honorees read at McNally Jackson, introduced by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Whiting 2013).

If you’re wondering what all this “Whiting” is: Founded in 1985, the Whiting Awards, of fifty thousand dollars each, are based on “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” The program has awarded more than six million dollars to some 320 writers and poets, including Colson Whitehead, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alice McDermott, Akhil Sharma, David Foster Wallace, August Wilson, Tracy K. Smith, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jeffrey Eugenides, and The Paris Review’s own Mona Simpson and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Read excerpts of White and Williams's poetry here, and here. Congratulations to all of the winners!