Three Women With Academic Ties Receive Whiting Writers’ Awards

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 women with current academic affiliations at American institutions of higher education.

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: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White (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.”

Shubha Sunder teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her debut short story collection, Boomtown Girl (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), is set in her hometown of Bangalore, India. The collection won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award and was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Award and the New American Press Fiction Prize. She is also the author of the novel, Optional Practical Training (Graywolf Press, 2025). The foundation’s selction committee stated the Sunder’s storytelling is confident, her prose charged; it compresses the everyday with the kind of force that renders carbon into jewel. With the steadiness of her gaze and the slow unwinding of story, she draws you in so far that you might as well be one of her characters.”

Photo Credits: Beowulf Sheehan