The Whiting Foundation announced the winners of their 2025 Whiting Awards for emerging writers Wednesday evening.
The awards, celebrating their 40th year, have helped launch the writing careers of many now well-known authors, including Colson Whitehead, Ocean Vuong, Alice McDermott and Jia Tolentino. Many have gone on to win prestigious literary prizes including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards.
This year's winners come from a diverse array of racial and ethnic backgrounds – and from locations around the country and the world. They are poets, playwrights, novelists, and historians. The winners each receive $50K, with the idea that it will help give them some freedom to hone their craft.
In a statement, Courtney Hodell, Whiting's Director of Literary Programs, said of the group: "These writers demonstrate astounding range; each has invented the tools they needed to carve out their narratives and worlds."
Here are the 2025 Whiting Award Winners:
(with comments from the Whiting committee)
Elwin Cotman, author of four collections of short stories and the novel The Age of Ignorance (forthcoming this year), whose speculative fiction is "exuberant...illuminating sites of bawdy humor and of horror...his stories launch into a fabulist stratosphere, but their parabolic trajectory plunges them back into an unsparing reality"
Emil Ferris, author of the graphic novels My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two, whose work "explode[s] expectations of genre and form and alter[s] the way readers understand their experience of family, memory, and art"
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, author of The Road to the Salt Sea, whose work is "populated by unforgettable characters whom he presents with unthinkable choices... his portrait of immigrants on the move through and toward the unknown melds gripping narrative with indelible testimony"
Claire Luchette, author of Agatha of Little Neon, whose fiction is "laugh-out-loud funny and proves that great charm does not preclude great depth...This writer is a portraitist of the overlooked, the ungovernable, the believers trying to take their wobbles of faith in stride"
Shubha Sunder, author of the short story collection Boomtown Girl and the novel Optional Practical Training, whose "storytelling is confident, her prose charged; it compresses the everyday with the kind of force that renders carbon into a jewel."
Aisha Sabatini Sloan, author of the essay collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, whose collection of cultural criticism "dazzles with startling connections between the personal and the collective. This is the haunting testimony of one who feels herself a born trespasser... Ever alert but fearless, she makes spaces her own"
Sofi Thanhauser, author of Worn: A People's History of Clothing, whose literary journalism conveys a "uniquely elegant intelligence...[Her] curiosity is a gift to the reader; her sentences are as layered as her investigations, which look with a devoted intensity at the objects around us that might otherwise escape our attention."
Karisma Price, author of I'm Always so Serious, whose collection of poems steeped in the history of New Orleans pre- and post-Katrina are "songs, howls, portraits, critiques... Price bends form and time, bringing together unexpected interlocutors to make sense of what cannot make sense – but the effort is sanctifying"
Annie Wenstrup, Dena'ina poet and author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories, who "interrogates history and its institutions, reminding us that beauty and commerce, nostalgia and revision, the mythic and the quotidian, are not opposites but kin."
Liza Birkenmeier, author of the plays Dr. Ride's American Beach House and Grief Hotel, whose works "begin as languid hangouts and turn into an absurdist supercollider full of swerves and spaces...Wistful and incisive, her plays tuck big ideas inside syncopated fragments of chat that capture the music of how we think and speak now."
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