Before It Vanishes

On Wednesday evening, April 15, 2026, the Whiting Foundation gathered at the New York Historical Society and announced ten recipients of the Whiting Award for Emerging Writers. Each received fifty thousand dollars. The foundation has given the award since 1985 — a first opportunity, it says, for writers to devote themselves fully to their work.

One of the ten was Hajar Hussaini, an Afghan poet now teaching at Skidmore College in New York. The judges described her debut collection,

One of the ten was Hajar Hussaini, an Afghan poet now teaching at Skidmore College in New York. The judges described her debut collection, Disbound, as “a marvel of poetic architecture” and said her poems show how “mere fragments can contain the entirety of times, places, and people we thought lost.”

Hussaini grew up in Kabul. Her family returned there after the fall of the first Taliban regime. She lived in the city for ten years — came of age there, built friendships there, absorbed its streets and its losses. She left in 2014 to continue her studies. She has not been back since 2018.

She wrote her poems in English, her second language, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She turned her memories of Kabul into poems — her family, the mob killing of Farkhunda Malikzada in 2015, the sound of a city living alongside war. She wrote about a place she can no longer visit. She wrote because without the writing, those fragments would exist nowhere but inside her.

The award is not the point. The writing is the point. The award simply confirms what the writing already was.

In 1935, Anna Akhmatova’s son Lev Gumilev was arrested by Stalin’s secret police in Leningrad. He would be arrested again, sent to the labor camps, held for years. Akhmatova spent seventeen months standing in prison lines outside the Kresty Prison, trying to learn whether he was alive, trying to deliver parcels.

She wrote poems about what she saw. But writing them down was too dangerous. The manuscript would mean arrest, perhaps death. So, she and a small circle of trusted friends memorized them. The poems existed only in human memory — held in the minds of a handful of people against the day they might be written down.

A woman in the prison line recognized Akhmatova one morning. She leaned close and whispered a question: “Can you describe this?”

Akhmatova said: “I can.”

She published Requiem — the cycle of poems born in those prison lines — in Munich in 1963, years after Stalin’s death, while still living in the Soviet Union. It could not appear in Russia until 1987. By then, Akhmatova had been dead for twenty-one years.

She wrote: “I was with my people then, there, where my people, unfortunately, were.”

The poems survived because she refused to let them vanish. Because she said yes when asked if she could describe it.

Hussaini and Akhmatova wrote in different languages, under different pressures, across a century of distance. The line between them is the same line.

The Power of Authors teaches that the writer’s deepest purpose is not performance but presence — standing where silence begins and writing what is real before it disappears. Not writing for an audience. Not writing for a market. Writing because some truths exist in only one place: in the person who lived them.

Kabul is changing. The city Hussaini knew — its intellectual circles, its street life, the faces of the people who shaped her — is not the city it was when she left. She cannot go back to verify it. She can only write from what she carried out.

That is what the fragments hold. Not nostalgia. Not performance. The irreplaceable record of a specific life in a specific place at a specific moment that will not come again.

Akhmatova stood in a prison line in a city under terror and said she could describe it. She kept her word for decades, across every danger, until the words could finally be printed.

You may not be standing in a prison line. But you are carrying something. A place. A person. A time in your life that is receding. A truth no one else was present to witness.

Write it before it vanishes. That is not a small thing. That is the whole work. That is what the power of authors means when it is real.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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