Between the hurricane and the election, perhaps you missed it–but the winners of the Whiting writing awards were recently announced, and we’re delighted to note that two writers we’ve covered here at FWR, Alan Heathcock and Hanna Pylväinen, were among the winners!
Congratulations, Al and Hanna!
Further Reading:
- Read our review of Alan Heathcock’s collection Volt, in which reviewer Tyler McMahon notes,
The prose moves like an old flatbed down a one-lane road: with confidence, with wisdom, and with a trail of meaning drifting skyward in the mind’s rear-view mirror. It is the poetry of bowling balls through shop windows—of freedom, of consequences, and of beautiful sounds.
- Take a peek into Heathcock’s (ridiculously cool) writing space.
- Jennifer Tomscha recently interviewed Hanna Pylväinen for FWR. Here’s a snippet:
Writing has become my own form of confession and my own form of absolution.
I don’t mean confession in the sense of exposé or of dirty laundry or of revealing sordid truths. Especially in We Sinners, I’m not interested very much in why people choose to leave these communities. I’m much more interested in why people choose to stay. Religion used to be my way of centering and understanding my world, of making my decisions. Religion gave me the terms of my life, and, to some extent, now writing dictates those terms. I think of writing as a means for me to obsess with what I’ve always obsessed with, which is God. Emily Dickinson once said that her flood subject was Death, and I think my flood subject is God. It’s an obsession I never tire of.
- The Whiting Writers Awards are given annually to ten emerging writers in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. For the complete list of this year’s winners, visit their website.
