Flora Ettlinger Whiting was the daughter of Louis E. Ettlinger who owned the Crowell, Collier Publishing Company and the Persian Rug Manufactory. In 1899, she married Giles Whiting, an architect and designer. She made an early investment in IBM when the company still made cash registers and by the time of her death in 1971, she was a very wealthy woman.
Since 1985, the Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Writers’ Awards which are given annually to 10 emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays. Each winner receives $50,000. The awards are based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.
Three of this year’s winners are Black scholars with current academic affiliations at American institutions of higher education.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He teaches fiction writing full time as an assistant professor of English and African studies at Pennsylvania State University. He also recently joined the faculty of the master of fine arts in writing at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. His debut novel, The Road to the Salt Sea (Amistad, 2024), was a finalist for the International Book Awards, long-listed for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and is long-listed for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Dr. Kọ́láwọlé holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Rhodes University in South Africa. He earned a master of fine arts degree in writing and publishing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Ph.D. in English and creative writing from Georgia State University.
A native of New Orleans, Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). She was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and is the 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Price earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Columbia University in New York City and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from New York University. The prize committee stated that “the poems of Karisma Price are songs, howls, portraits, critiques; they move nimbly between the narrative and the lyric. Price bends form and time, bringing together unexpected interlocutors to make sense of what cannot make sense.”
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan. A native of Los Angeles, she is the author of The Fluency of Light(University of Iowa Press 2013), Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (1913 Press, 2017), and a book-length essay, Borealis (Coffee House Press, 2021). A graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, she holds a master’s degree in studio art and cultural studies from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and a master of fine arts degree in nonfiction from the University of Arizona. The Whiting Foundation noted that “in dreamlike, imagistic essays, Aisha Sabatini Sloan tests the possibilities of collaged thought, framing insight with generous silences that widen to accommodate the readers’ response. You could return to these pages a dozen times and encounter something new.”
