Three Women Academics Win 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 they still made cash registers and by the time of her death in 1971, she was a very wealthy woman.

Since 1985, the Mrs. Giles 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.

This year six of the 10 winners of the Whiting Writers’ Awards are women. Three of these six women current hold faculty positions in academia.

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams is a lecturer in the department of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She holds two bachelor’s degrees and a master of fine arts degree from UNCW. She is the author of the novella The Man Who Danced With Dolls (Madras Press, 2012) and is currently at work on a memoir entitled The Following Sea.

Jennifer duBois teaches in the master of fine arts writing program at Texas State University-San Marcos. A native of Northampton, Massachusetts, duBois is a graduate of Tufts University, where she majored in political science and philosophy. She earned a master of fine arts degree at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novels A Partial History of Lost Causes (Dial Press, 2012) and Cartwheel (Random House, 2013).

Stephanie Powell Watts is an associate professor of English at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Dr. Watts is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. Her short story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need (BkMK Press, 2011) won the 2012 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. She is currently working on a novel entitled No One Is Coming to Save Us.