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Since its inception, the program has awarded more than $6 million to 240 poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights. Among the past recipients who have achieved acclaim and prominence in their field are Denis Johnson, Jorie Graham, Kim Edwards, William T. Vollman, Sarah Ruhl, Mark Doty, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, and Colson Whitehead. This year’s winners – three of whom have yet to publish their first books – represent an array of styles and backgrounds. There are five fiction writers, three poets, one nonfiction writer and one playwright. “It’s a great pleasure to see what fine work is coming out of this year’s group of award recipients, in all its variousness and vigor, ” said Barbara Bristol, the Director of the Writers’ Program. “These writers are strikingly well-traveled in imagination if not in fact. We expect we will hear from them again and again in the years to come.” The 2008 recipients were announced at a ceremony at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York on Wednesday, October 29. Dr. Robert L. Belknap, President of the Foundation, and trustee Kate Douglas Torrey presented the ten writers with their awards. The keynote speaker of the evening was distinguished fiction and nonfiction writer Barry Lopez. He is the author of Arctic Dreams, which won the National Book Award in 1986, Of Wolves and Men, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1979, Resistance, and Light Action in the Caribbean, among other works. A life-long study of the human relationship to the natural world has brought him most recently to edit a compendium, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (Trinity University Press). His essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. He lives in western Oregon. The ten writers recognized this year for their extraordinary talent and promise are: Mischa Berlinski, fiction. His first novel, Fieldwork, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. He is at work on a second novel and living in Haiti. Rick Hilles, poetry. His first collection, Brother Salvage, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at Vanderbilt University and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Donovan Hohn, nonfiction. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Agni, The Bedford Reader, and Internazionale. His first book will be published by Viking in 2010. Douglas Kearney, poetry. He is the author of Fear, Some (Red Hen Press, 2006) and the forthcoming collection, The Black Automaton, which will be published by Fence Books in 2009. He has an MFA in writing from the California Institute of the Arts, where he now teaches. Laleh Khadivi, fiction. Her first book, The Age of Orphans, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2009. She is currently the fiction fellow at Emory University in Atlanta. Manuel Muñoz, fiction. He is the author of two collections of short stories, Zigzagger (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books, 2007). He lives in Tucson, where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. Dael Orlandersmith, plays. Her plays include Yellowman, The Gimmick and her Obie-Award winning Beauty’s Daughter, in which she also starred. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College and is at work on a memoir.. Benjamin Percy, fiction. He is the author of two short story collections, The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006) and Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2008). He teaches in the MFA program at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Julie Sheehan, poetry. She is the author of two collections of poems, Thaw (Fordham University Press, 2001), and Orient Point (Norton, 2006). She teaches in the graduate Writing and Literature program at Stony Brook Southampton and lives in East Quogue, New York. Lysley Tenorio, fiction. He has recently completed a collection of short stories and is working on a novel. He lives in San Francisco and teaches at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California. For more detailed biographies of the 2008 winners, click here. Whiting Writers’ Awards candidates are proposed by about a hundred anonymous nominators from across the country whose experience and vocations give them knowledge about individuals of extraordinary talent. Winners are chosen by a small anonymous selection committee of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation. At four meetings over the course of the year, the selectors discuss the candidates’ work and gradually winnow the list. They then 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. For more information about the selection process, click here. 
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