We’re proud to announce that Michener Center Alumnus and playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig (MCW 2009) is the recipient of a 2024 Whiting Award. The Whiting Awards give $50,000 each to ten exceptional emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
The 2024 Whiting Awards Judges praised how Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “meticulous and politically acute fables bring the histories of nations, of capital, and of censorship to life.”
According to the Whiting Foundation, “The prizes are designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent, giving most winners the chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.”
“This year’s winners have made liminal space their own — that place of potential that exists between states, whether those are genres, languages, countries, or definitions of self,” said Courtney Hodell, Whiting’s Director of Literary Programs. “The rigor and fluid beauty of their writing make us excited for the work to come.”
Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig‘s trilogy The China Plays was recently published by Methuen Drama. They were produced in the U.K. at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hampstead Theatre, and the National Theatre, and in the U.S. at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Manhattan Theater Club, Classic Stage, and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Cowhig was born in Philadelphia and raised in Northern Virginia, Okinawa, Taipei, and Beijing; her father worked for the US State Department. Her work has been honored with the Wasserstein Prize, the Yale Drama Series Award (selected by David Hare), an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, the Keene Prize for Literature, and a United States Artist Fellowship.
Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and the short-story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been recognized with a Whiting Writer’s Award, three O. Henry Awards, and two selections in Best American Short Stories, and was awarded the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. His most recent collection, The Consequences, was published by Graywolf Press and in the UK by The Indigo Press in October 2022. It was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize. It will be published in Italian by Edizioni Black Coffee and in Turkish by Livera Yayinevi. In October 2023, he was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship for “depicting with empathy and nuance the Mexican-American communities of California’s Central Valley.” His frequently anthologized work has appeared in The New York Times, Epoch, and Glimmer Train. His most recent work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, ZYZZYVA, and Freeman’s. A native of Dinuba, California, and a first-generation college student, Manuel graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell University. He currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.
