Whiting Writers' Awards announced

NEW YORK - Ten emerging writers have each received $35,000 as winners of the annual Whiting Writers' Awards for "exceptional talent and promise."

Among works by this year's recipients are "Catfish and Mandala," a memoir by Andrew X. Pham about searching for his family in Vietnam; poems by Claude Wilkinson set in the rural South; and Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist," a New York-based novel about elevator inspectors.

Other winners this year are fiction writers John McManus, Lily King, Samantha Gillison and Robert Cohen, poets Albert Mobilio and James Thomas Stevens, and playwright Kelly Stuart.

Previous winners include Mary Karr, Michael Cunningham, Tony Kushner and David Foster Wallace.