2024 Whiting Award winners: Aaliyah Bilal, Yoon Choi, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Elisa Gonzalez, Taylor Johnson, Gothataone Moeng, Charif Shanahan, Javier Zamora, and Ada Zhang (photos by Beowulf Sheehan)
Ten emerging writers joined the prestigious ranks of Whiting Award winners in a New York City ceremony this Wednesday, April 10. In addition to a $50,000 prize, these “exceptional new writers who have yet to make their mark in the literary culture” received a small token from the far side of literary immortality: Library of America volumes picked specially for each awardee by the selection committee (Whiting’s executive director Daniel Reid once called it “our equivalent of the Oscar statue”).
Past recipients include LOA Influences columnists Catherine Lacey and Ling Ma, and going back further you’ll find figures like Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Deborah Eisenberg, Lydia Davis—and, in 1988, former LOA editor in chief Geoffrey O’Brien.
“This year’s winners have made liminal space their own,” said Whiting’s director of literary programs Courtney Hodell, “that place of potential that exists between states, whether those are genres, languages, countries, or definitions of self.” LOA is delighted to see these powerful crosscurrents, so central to the story of American literature, continue to animate and lift these new and vital voices.
The 2024 Whiting Award recipients are listed below, accompanied by the titles of the LOA books they were awarded. (Each book title links to the relevant page on our site.)
Aaliyah Bilal (Fiction)
Virginia Hamilton: Five Novels
Yoon Choi (Fiction)
John Cheever: Collected Stories & Other Writings
Shayok Misha Chowdhury (Drama)
Jane Bowles: Collected Writings
Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig (Drama)
James Baldwin: Collected Essays
Elisa Gonzalez (Poetry)
Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters
Taylor Johnson (Poetry)
Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings
Gothataone Moeng (Fiction)
Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories
Charif Shanahan (Poetry)
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song
Javier Zamora (Nonfiction)
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories: One Night In Brazil to The Death Of Methuselah
Ada Zhang (Fiction)
William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories
Congratulations to this year’s winners! We hope that their LOA books will provide much encouragement and inspiration in the years ahead.
