Amy Herzon Announced Among Recipients Of 2011 Whiting Writers' Awards

The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation today named ten recipients of the 2011 Whiting Writers' Awards. The awards, now $50,000 each totaling $500,000, have been given annually since 1985 to writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career.

The program has awarded more than $6 million to 270 poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights. Among the past recipients who have gone on to achieve acclaim and prominence in their field are Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Tony Kushner, Jonathan Franzen, Lisa Shea, Michael Cunningham, Mary Karr, Allegra Goodman, Wayne Koestenbaum, Rajiv Joseph and Terrance Hayes.

The 2011 winners - four fiction writers, four poets, a nonfiction writer and a playwright - display an audacious range of talent and subject matter. "The Selection Committee has given us a marvelously eclectic group of writers," said Barbara Bristol, Director of the Writers' Program. "It is wonderful to see from the books these writers have published that the small, independent presses and university presses continue to be a strong, vital presence in the literary world, and it is also heartening that the larger presses are still investing in emerging literary talent."

The 2011 recipients were announced at a ceremony at the Times Center on Tuesday, October 25. Mark Doty gave the keynote address and read the Awards citations. Whiting Foundation President Robert Belknap presented the awards to the recipients.

With poetry well-represented among this year's winners, it was especially appropriate that the Foundation tapped one of their own past poetry recipients, Mark Doty (1994), to offer the keynote address. Doty is one of the most fearless and elegant poets of our time. He is the author of eight books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. He is also the author of four volumes of nonfiction prose, including the bestselling Dog Years. Among his many other honors are the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Lila Wallace/Readers Digest foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K. He is on the faculty at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

The ten writers recognized this year for their extraordinary talent and promise are:

Scott Blackwood, fiction. His novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, was published by New Issues Press in 2009. He lives in Chicago.

Ryan Call, fiction. His first collection of stories, The Weather Stations, was published this year by Caketrain. He lives in Houston.

Don Mee Choi, poetry. Her first collection, The Morning News is Exciting, was published by Action Books in 2010. She lives in Seattle.

Paul Clemens, nonfiction. He is the author of Made In Detroit (Doubleday, 2005) and Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant (Doubleday, 2011). He lives in Detroit.

Eduardo C. Corral, poetry. His book, Slow Lightning, will be published next year by Yale University Press. He lives in Casa Grande, Arizona.

Amy Herzog, plays. Her productions include After the Revolution and 4,000 Miles. Her new play, Belleville, opens this month at the Yale Repertory Theater. She lives in Brooklyn.

Daniel Orozco, fiction. His collection of stories, Orientation, was published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is currently living in Moscow, Idaho.

Shane McCrae, poetry. His debut collection of poetry, Mule, was published this year by Cleveland State University Press. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Teddy Wayne, fiction. His first novel, Kapitoil, was published in 2010 by Harper Perennial. He lives in Manhattan.

Kerri Webster, poetry. Her first book, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2005. She lives in Boise, Idaho.

More detailed biographies of the winners are attached.

Whiting Writers' Awards candidates are proposed by about a hundred anonymous nominators from across the country whose experience and vocations give them knowledge about writers in early career. Winners are chosen by a small anonymous selection committee of recognized writers and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation. At four meetings over the course of the year, the selectors discuss the candidates' work and recommend up to ten writers for awards to the Foundation's Trustees. The Foundation accepts nominations only from the designated nominators.

The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation was established in 1963 by Flora E. Whiting. In 1972, her unrestricted bequest of over $10 million enabled the Foundation to establish the Whiting Fellowships in the Humanities for doctoral candidates in their dissertation year. In the years since, the Foundation has annually awarded grants to Bryn Mawr, University of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale to fund these Fellowships, the recipients of which are selected by each institution. The Foundation created the Whiting Writers' Awards in 1985 under the direction of Gerald Freund, who organized and led the program until his death in 1997.

***The Whiting Foundation has a new and improved website***

Go to www.whitingfoundation.org

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