← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
How the Whiting Awards Have Discovered New Literary Talent for 40 Years
00:16:53
Courtney Hodell, director of literary programs with the Whiting Foundation, discusses her role overseeing the awards, and how the Foundation has become so adept at identifying emerging literary talent.
Loading summary
Transcript45 lines
- [00:00]
Progressive Insurance Ad
All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name youe Price Tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by state law not available in all states.
- [00:24]
Listener
Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
- [00:38]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This week marked the 40th anniversary of the Whiting Awards, a literary prize given out each year to 10 promising new writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. The prize has been particularly good at identifying emerging literary talent before they become household names. For example, here are just some of the past Whiting Award winners. Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, Susan Lori Parks, Tobias Wolfe, Jonathan Franzen, Tony Kushner, Victor Lavalle, Tracy K. Smith, and so many more. The Whiting Awards don't accept submissions. Instead, they rely on a group of reliable readers to anonymously nominate new writers they've encountered. On Wednesday, 10 new winners were announced, and if you haven't heard of them yet, you likely will in the future. Courtney Houdel is the director of Liter Programs at the Whiting Foundation. She has described herself as a literary truffle hunter, and she joins me now to discuss what the hunting process entails. Nice to meet you.
- [01:39]
Listener
Thank you for having me.
- [01:40]
Alison Stewart
So you've been with the whiting foundation since 2013?
- [01:43]
Courtney Hodel
That's right.
- [01:44]
Alison Stewart
Now, before that, you were a literary editor. How did being an editor prepare you for this role?
- [01:49]
Listener
Well, I read deeply and omnivorously and voraciously and tried to train myself as a reader for the work of finding new writers, but also finding writers that had promise that maybe hadn't been fully realized, artists that were kind of bringing their vision together before your eyes and trying to do something new with it. And when you're an editor, that is the point where it's really exciting to work with somebody because you're like, what might they do? And how could I help them do it?
- [02:22]
Alison Stewart
So how did you go from being an editor to the Whiting Foundation? It's a pretty good job.
- [02:27]
Listener
It's the best job. I have the best job. It's true. I found that my sympathies were starting to be more and more with the writer and the struggle of that work. And when you're an editor in house, your sympathies are necessarily a little bit divided. You care deeply about the house you work for, the books that it's publishing you want it to do well. You want readers to come to those books, but you're also an advocate for the writer who maybe has a different set of concerns. And so I just found my heart going to this other place where I thought, you know, the writers have it increasingly hard now. A lot of the burden of getting the word out about their books now rests on them. There's this beautiful vision of writers being kind of alone in a room, you know, working on their novels, their memoirs, their histories. But. But increasingly now they have to be their own publishing house. You know, they have to figure out how to find an audience. They have to have a big social media platform. They have to get out there and support their book once it's out in the world. And so this illusion of just being able to be in the room with the work, you know, that's something a little bit from the past. So a lot of what we do at the foundation is trying to help them with that work and give them the space and resources to do it.
- [03:50]
Alison Stewart
So with any kind of awards, you know, the SAG Awards are actors recognizing actors versus the Oscars, which is larger. What does a Whiting Award signify? Being a Whiting Award winner?
- [04:02]
Listener
That's such a good question. The Whiting Awards signify not just great work that's already been done, but promise for the future. So what we try to do is catch people at this early stage of development where there's a sense that if they get a huge infusion of resources and recognition and encouragement, they'll be able to reach and do, you know, do even braver work. So the prizes are $50,000 for each writer, which at this career stage is really significant. And it gives them this sense. We try to create the sense of plenitude and possibility that they can work from. And it's really about being recognized by your peers, because the nominators, our anonymous nominators, are editors and critics and literary tastemakers, but they're also fellow writers, and.
- [04:55]
Alison Stewart
Writers know what's good within the industry itself. What does it mean to win a Whiting Award? How does it help your reputation?
- [05:05]
Listener
Well, what people in the industry tell us is that they look to the Whitings for the writers that they should be paying attention to next. And we've had these marvelous experiences where we publish these little chapbooks every year, which is samples of the new work, so people can instantly start reading these perhaps unfamiliar names. And the writer Rita Bullwinkle, who had a magnificent debut novel this year, headshot nominated for many important prizes. A lot of the editors who were looking at that novel encountered her work through this chat book. So they saw the Whiting name, and they were like, okay, this is a writer we want to pay attention to. Then her novel comes to them, and they're ready. They want it. They want to grab it.
- [05:53]
Alison Stewart
My guest is Courtney Hodel, director of literary programs at the Whiting Foundation. We're Talking about the 40th anniversary of the Whiting Awards, a prize given out each year to 10 emerging writers. The 2025 winners were announced on Wednesday. So you begin with a list of 100 different writers that have been submitted.
- [06:09]
Courtney Hodel
By editors as you described.
- [06:11]
Alison Stewart
Once you have a list, add, how do you whittle it down? What kind of criteria are you looking for?
- [06:17]
Listener
We're looking for freshness, for surprise, for beauty on the page, for a kind of striking architecture to the work. We're looking for something that makes our breath catch in our throats. And we share this work with our six anonymous judges who are experts in the field. I mean, they're just total rock stars. Every time we gather them together, I have to overcome my sense of nerves in order to moderate these meetings. And that's where the judges really. They sit. They read this work really carefully, they debate it, they toss it back and forth, and they read deeply over the course of a year to find the winners.
- [06:59]
Courtney Hodel
So these people, these judges that are sitting around, would they be names that we know?
- [07:02]
Listener
Absolutely. Unfortunately, I can't share them.
- [07:07]
Courtney Hodel
When your judges are looking at the different forms of writing, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, is it the same criteria, or does it differ a little bit?
- [07:18]
Listener
You know, every year, we redefine what it is that we're looking for and what we're excited about. And one of the interesting things about this particular prize makes it a bit different from others is all of the judges read all of those genres, so they might be really expert in one field. They might be, you know, an expert in drama, but they also have to read poetry and nonfiction and novels and have strong considered opinions about those as well. And so that gives it this sort of, like, spark of energy and surprise to the conversations.
- [07:51]
Courtney Hodel
It's interesting because we get so many books here, and we start to notice trends that certain things are, you know, books that are set not too distant in the future. That's been really big lately. What have you seen as trends for 2025?
- [08:06]
Listener
Well, we're seeing this interesting trend where writers don't feel pinned down to one genre. So it used to Be when I first started as an editor. If you're a novelist, you are a novelist. If you're a poet, you're a poet. You stayed in your lane. And now I feel writers are feeling much more emboldened to choose the form that fits the project and let their ideas expand into it. So we've had poets who've written novels and, you know, playwrights who've written memoirs. And I love that. I love that sense of sort of freedom.
- [08:40]
Alison Stewart
Yeah.
- [08:40]
Listener
Ocean Huang, that's a perfect example. So he won a Whiting Award in 2016 for poetry. And it's interesting. He used his $50,000 in prize money to buy his mother a house. His mother had been a nail salon worker her whole life. She was an immigrant. And he said that buying her this house, taking care of his own, allowed his sense of possibility to expand. It allowed his imagination, his ambition to expand. The next thing he did was write this fabulous novel on Earth. We're briefly gorgeous. It's since sold a million copies. It's been translated into 40 languages. It has touched so many people. And that's at the root of what trying to do is finding people at this early stage and helping them realize what could be.
- [09:40]
Courtney Hodel
Also the idea that you don't have control of the money. It doesn't have to go back into the writing. It could go wherever it's needed the most.
- [09:47]
Listener
Wherever we've had people tell us that they put a roof on their house, that they paid off credit card debt. One writer told us that he'd only had enough money in his bank account to fill up his car with gas one more time. And then the $50,000 came along. What a gift that is, to be able to give freedom from anxiety for a time to someone who's doing this big, deep, challenging, hard work of creating.
- [10:19]
Courtney Hodel
Many of the writers, they're coming to you after having other careers. There's one person who was in their 70s.
- [10:26]
Listener
Actually, she's a little bit younger than that, but in fact, yes. She published her first book when she was in late 50s, and it was her debut book. Her name is Emil Ferris and the book is called My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. It's a graphic novel. It's set in Chicago, but also touches on the Holocaust. And it's stitched together with these beautiful evocations of the American pulp horror magazines that she loved as a child. And when critics saw this, they hailed her instantly as a master of the form. It was like Athena springing from the head of Zeus. So being able to support a Writer at that point and say, yes, more. More of what you can do is wonderful.
- [11:12]
Courtney Hodel
Our guest is Courtney Hodel. She's the director of literary programs at the Whiting Foundation. We're Talking about the 40th anniversary of the Whiting foundation and the prize given out each year to 10 emerging writers. The 2025 winners were announced on Wednesday. Over your course. Over the course of working with the Whiting foundation, who was a person that you knew was really a generational talent.
- [11:35]
Listener
Oh, my gosh, there have been so many of those. I feel like we've. Yeah, they're legion. But a few that I can think of. One is Anne Boyer. She wrote this book called Garments Against Women. It was a 90 page lyric prose poem published by a tiny press, and I'd never read anything like it. In fact, I was reading it for the first time when I was getting my hair cut and I stumbled on this line. I'd like to share it with you. Sure, please. She wrote, I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would also be a book about the history of literature and literature's uses against women. Also against shopping and for it. But who would publish this book and who also would shop for it? And when I read that line, my head just sort of jerked out of like, just delight and surprise. And the haircutter was like, easy now, stay still. But I thought, wow, this is. This is philosophy, this is wit, this is someone confessing. And later she won a Whiting Award. And then a few years later, she won a Pulitzer for her memoir, the Undying, which was about her experience with cancer. A staggering book, but it was all there in that little 90 page booklet.
- [13:01]
Alison Stewart
All right, let's talk about the 10 winners for 2025. What do you think these writers represent about the future of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama?
- [13:11]
Listener
Well, they're just a marvelous mosaic portrait of new writing in this country. They're full of curiosity and fire and the desire to explore. I think they're reflecting some of the tens and fault lines that are running through our society right now. But they do that by looking at individuals. So this is not declarative work. This is not. I'm diagnosing a larger situation. This is revealing how we live and who we are through story.
- [13:44]
Alison Stewart
Who's a person that you may have missed in 10 years. Who's a person? You think, ah, so close. We almost gave that person an award, but they did just fine.
- [13:55]
Listener
Yeah, there are lots of those, actually. Every year as we're considering our hundred writers, there's someone who has some sort of magnificent career event, some sort of brilliant stroke of very earned luck and, you know, hits the bestseller list or wins another prize. And then we shed a quiet tear and set them aside and wish them well. But there are so many great writers to support in this country, so many talents.
- [14:21]
Alison Stewart
When you first started doing this in 2015, 10 years ago, what do you remember about that class of winners? It's got to be your. A little bit of favorite in your hearts.
- [14:32]
Listener
Gosh. What I remember actually from that year was what I didn't know, which was utterly terrifying. I had never worked on a prize process before. I had, yeah, I'd been behind the scenes at a publishing house. So we took a lot of time at that beginning moment, my then partner at the foundation and I, and we just dove into the archives. You know, we tried to figure out how it is that prizes are selected and how they're given out and what the consequences are to how the processes are run. So we went on a deep dive into the archives and discovered, you know, all of the incredible talents that had been involved in selecting the writers. And then we tried to carry on and do it at least half as well.
- [15:22]
Alison Stewart
How does the Whiting foundation help support the writers after they win?
- [15:29]
Listener
We try to do a number of things. We start out sort of the day after the ceremony, and I'm talking about yesterday. We have an industry lunch where we. Where we introduce them to 30 or so leading editors from magazines and newspapers who could commission pieces from them or cover their work. And we have this glorious, fun lunch and make sure it's a little bit like speed dating. And we make sure there are fantastic connections with good chemistry. We also have a financial literacy seminar for them. And that grew out of my. Yeah, I love this. I learn from it every single year. It's a three hour seminar. And, you know, it started from my. My horror when I learned that the prize money was taxable. And so I had this. This terrible vision of a writer, like gleefully spending their $50,000 and being on the hook to the IRS at the end of it. So I was like, we have to have someone come in and help them understand this. And it grew from there to talk about, you know, debt and savings and retirement, because everything we do is about trying to help writers keep writing. And it's a tough road. It's got a lot of ups, it's got a lot of downs. And we want people to be in that chair facing that blank page or screen as long as they can do it.
- [16:47]
Alison Stewart
My guest has been Courtney Hodel, director of literary programs at the Whiting Foundation. We've been Talking about the 40th anniversary of the Whiting Awards, a prize given out each year to 10 emerging writers. The 2025 winners were announced on Wednesday. Where can people go to find out who the 10 winners are?
- [17:04]
Listener
Oh, gosh, you can go to our website, www.whiting.org. that's a tongue twister. But they were also announced on npr, which will be running excerpts and find their books in your local bookstore.
- [17:17]
Alison Stewart
Courtney, thank you for joining us.
- [17:19]
Listener
Thank you so much for having me.
- [17:23]
Progressive Insurance Ad
Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.