Honorees clockwise from top left: Phillip B. Williams, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lisa Halliday, Simone White, Clarence Coo, Clare Barron, Francisco Cantú, James Ijames, Jen Beagin, Tony Tulathimutte.

For the third consecutive year, The Paris Review Daily is pleased to announce the ten winners of the annual Whiting Awards. Drum roll, please—they are:

• Clare Barron, drama
• Jen Beagin, fiction
• Francisco Cantú, nonfiction
• Clarence Coo, drama
• Kaitlyn Greenidge, fiction
• Lisa Halliday, fiction
• James Ijames, drama
• Tony Tulathimutte, fiction
• Simone White, poetry
• Phillip B. Williams, poetry

We’re proud to have selected writing from all the Whiting honorees, too. Click each name above to read on—you’ll discover work by some of the best writers of their generation, astonishing in its breadth and depth. If you need further evidence of their creativity, here’s a random profusion of the nouns they use: blue cheese, lotion, pantslessness, dark desert nights, the subjunctive, spoiled-milk breath, “Q-TIPS!!!”, infrastructure, pepperoni-size ear gauges, black-ass tumbleweed, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and one Mr. Disgusting. This Thursday, March 23, New Yorkers can hear all of these wonders firsthand, as the honorees read at McNally Jackson, introduced by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Whiting 2013).

If you’re wondering what all this “Whiting” is: Founded in 1985, the Whiting Awards, of fifty thousand dollars each, are based on “early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” The program has awarded more than six million dollars to some 320 writers and poets, including Colson Whitehead, Suzan-Lori Parks, Alice McDermott, Akhil Sharma, David Foster Wallace, August Wilson, Tracy K. Smith, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Jeffrey Eugenides, and The Paris Review’s own Mona Simpson and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Click here for a list of all the previous honorees.

Congratulations to this year’s honorees! For more great writing from past recipients, check out our collections from 2015 and 2016 winners.