Poet Eduardo Corral Wins Whiting Award

Eduardo C. Corral

Corral’s poetry manuscript, Slow Lightning, which he worked on during a 2007 Yaddo residency, also was chosen as the winner of the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and will be published in April by Yale University Press. “These poems are alluring, moving, playful and elegiac,” said the Whiting judges. “They have flashes of surrealism and sometimes a lovely in extremis strangeness.” Corral has a BA from Arizona State University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. A resident of Casa Grande, Arizona, he is the recipient of the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing at Colgate University and the Discovery/The Nation Award. His writing has been published in anthologies and in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry, Jubilat, Witness, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Nation, and Quarterly West.

The Whiting Awards are based on accomplishment and promise. Candidates are proposed by nominators from across the country whose experience and vocations bring them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent. Winners are chosen by a selection committee, a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation. Both nominators and selectors serve anonymously. The program has honored 270 poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights with grants totaling more than $6 million. Previous Yaddo winners of the award include Mona Simpson, Michael Cunningham, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Mark Doty, who gave the keynote address and read the citations at this year's presentation ceremony. For a complete list of the 51 Yaddo winners of the Whiting Awards, click here.