Rhetoric Department PhD candidate Linda Kinstler has been announced as one of 10 Whitting Award winners on March 29. The prizes are designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners their first chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work. Kinstler is a contributing writer for Jewish Currents and The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, and the deputy editor of The Dial. Her writing has been cited by the International Court of Justice and has inspired documentaries. Kinstler’s work appears in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Wired, and more. Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends is her first nonfiction book.
The Whiting Awards, established by the Whiting Foundation in 1985 and celebrating their 38th anniversary, remain one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts ($50,000) for emerging writers. They are given to recognize early-career achievement and empower recipients to fulfill the promise of exceptional literary work to come. A total of $9.5 million has been awarded to 370 fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, and playwrights to date.
“Every year we look to the new Whiting Award winners, writing fearlessly at the edge of imagination, to reveal the pathways of our thought and our acts before we know them ourselves,” said Courtney Hodell, Director of Literary Programs. “The prize is meant to create a space of ease in which such transforming work can be made.”
The ceremony will include a keynote by Pulitzer Prize winner and PEN president Ayad Akhtar. There will also be a reading by the 2023 Whiting Award winners on March 30th at The Center for Fiction at 6:30pm ET