Meet the 2021 Whiting Award winners

Congratulations to this year's Whiting Award winners!

The Whiting Foundation honors ten emerging fiction and nonfiction writers and grants each of them $50,000 so that they can focus on their creative projects.

Past recipients — including Ling Ma, Ocean Vuong, Colson Whitehead, and Tracy K. Smith — have gone on to gain considerable acclaim, so the grants certainly seem to work as intended.

Here are this year's winners:

• Fiction: Steven Dunn and Tope Folarin

• Nonfiction: Sarah Stewart Johnson

• Poetry: Marwa Helal, Ladan Osman, and Xandria Phillips

• Nonfiction and poetry: Joshua Bennett

• Drama: Jordan E. Cooper, Donnetta Lavinia Grays, and Sylvia Khoury

Check out the Whiting Awards’ current winner page for excerpts, praise, and more about each of the honorees.