Emma Wippermann '12, author of the forthcoming Joan of Arkansas (Ugly Duckling Presse), has won a 2023 Whiting Award for poetry and drama. The Whiting Awards, established by the Whiting Foundation in 1985, are given to recognize early-career achievement and empower recipients to fulfill the promise of exceptional literary work to come. They are one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts ($50,000) for emerging writers.
“Writing is such a slow and solitary thing. To be recognized in this way, to receive this kind of support—it’s a dream. I’m so grateful to be able to devote more time to my upcoming projects.” — Emma Wippermann '12
The Whiting Award judges wrote of Wipperman’s latest work, a queer drama about climate catastrophe and political divinity, that it is “a climate-anxious work marked not by didacticism but by sympathy; It conveys rapture even as it jokes with angels.”
Wippermann, who lives in Brooklyn, is also the author of Pleasure as a Series of Objects (Patient Sounds, 2019) and has published work in jubilat, Omniverse, Second Factory, No, Dear, Oversound, Temporary Art Review, and Organism for Poetic Research.