The Whiting Foundation has announced the ten recipients of the 2011 Whiting Writers’ Awards winners, featuring novelist Ryan Call, poet Don Mee Choi, nonfiction writer Paul Clemens, and playwright Amy Herzog. The Whiting Writers’ Awards are intended breakout writers whose early work exhibits “exceptional talent and promise,” according to the Foundation’s website. Each winner received $50,000.

The rest of the ten winners include poets Kerri Webster, Eduardo C. Corral, and Shane McCrae, and fiction writers Scott Blackwood, Daniel Orozco, and Teddy Wayne.

In a speech to this year’s awards winners, Mark Doty quoted Joy Williams: “The writer writes to serve—hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve—not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.”

Doty added some words of his own, “This is not the time to worry about cold elemental grace. (This is the time) for congratulations and delight, but it’s also about providing these extraordinary writers with fuel for the future, of a spiritual sort…”

Previous Whiting Award winners include Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and Terrance Hayes.

Read more about each of this year’s winners at http://www.whitingfoundation.org/...this_years_winners/.