The Whiting Award Names Ten Emerging Writers for 2026

There is something quietly defiant about the Whiting Award. It gives money to writers before they are famous, before the market has confirmed their value, before a publisher has committed significant resources to their future. It is, in that sense, a bet on the literary mind rather than on the literary product. This week, the Whiting Foundation announced its 2026 class: ten writers across fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and drama, each receiving $50,000.

The fiction recipients are Elaine Castillo, Hilary Leichter, and Lara Mimosa Montes. Castillo’s debut novel announced a writer of rare formal ambition; Leichter has built a reputation for prose that is structurally adventurous without ever losing its emotional core. Montes, a poet and essayist who operates at the intersection of hybrid forms, is the sort of writer whose work resists easy categorization — which is precisely what makes her interesting.

In poetry, the awards go to Hajar Hussaini, Brittany Rogers, and Alison C. Rollins. Hussaini, who writes from and about the Afghan diaspora, has produced work of both lyric intensity and historical weight. Rogers and Rollins each bring a command of form that feels less like technical mastery than like necessity: these are writers for whom the shape of a poem is inseparable from what it needs to say.

The nonfiction recipients — Negar Azimi, Karen Hao, and Carvell Wallace — represent the breadth of what serious nonfiction has become. Hao’s reporting on artificial intelligence and its consequences for labor and power has been some of the most important journalism of the past several years. Wallace has written with great humanity about race, family, and American music. Azimi brings a sharp eye to art, culture, and the political contexts that frame them.

The drama award goes to Celine Song, whose film Past Lives brought her international attention and whose theatrical work preceded and in some ways exceeds it. What the Whiting list suggests, taken as a whole, is that the most vital American writing right now is happening in the margins of genre, in the spaces between forms, in voices that have often had to fight for institutional recognition.

Whether these writers need that recognition to do their best work is another question. But it helps. And in a week when fifty-five publishing employees lost their jobs and a major literary prize ceremony took place in Alcalá de Henares, a list of writers receiving money to keep writing feels, if not precisely optimistic, then at least necessary.