John Hodgen of , Massachusetts, is the 2008 winner of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s annual Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. The editors of the BPJ select on the basis of its excellence a poem or group of poems they have published in the calendar year to receive the award. This year’s choice is a set of four poems by Hodgen which appeared in the Summer 2008 issue. The prize award is $2,500.

Hodgen is the author of three award-winning poetry books: Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), the winner of the 2005 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; Bread Without Sorrow (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize; and In My Father’s House (Emporia State University Press, 1993), winner of the Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas. He also won the 2005 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize from Hunger Mountain and the 2005 Foley Poetry Prize from America Magazine. He is Visiting Professor of English at Assumption College.

Humor grounded in compassion is a rare and precious quality in contemporary poetry. Hodgen’s winning poems play and pun their way effortlessly, it seems, through the aftermath of two wars, a plane crash, and a Sherlock Holmes psycho-drama. The characters who materialize out of the verbal hijinks create grace within destruction, among them Abraham Lincoln and his War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, who as the Civil War rages spend “the better part of one evening freeing two peacocks that [became] entangled in a tree.”

The Walsh Prize, established in 1993 by Alison Walsh Sackett and her husband Paul, honors Ms. Sackett’s father, the poet Chad Walsh (1914-1991), a co-founder in 1950 of the Beloit Poetry Journal. An author and scholar, Walsh published six volumes of poetry, including The End of Nature and Hang Me Up My Begging Bowl, several books on literary history, notably on C.S. Lewis, and edited textbooks and anthologies as well. He was professor and writer-in-residence at Beloit College, in Wisconsin, for thirty-two years, serving for many of those as chair of the English Department. He also taught as a Fulbright lecturer in Finland and Italy.

All poems published in 2008 will be eligible for that year's prize. Previous winners of the Chad Walsh award are Kurt Leland for "Remedies" (1993), Albert Goldbarth for The Two Domains (1994), Sherman Alexie for "Defending Walt Whitman" and "At the Trial of Hamlet, Chicago, 1994" (1995), Robert Chute for "Heat Wave in Concord" (1996), Mary Leader for "For the Love of Gerald Finzi" (1997), Lucia Perillo for "The Oldest Map with the Name America" (1998), Janet Holmes for "Partch Stations" (1999), Margaret Aho for four interrelated poems, "I dream I'm leaving," "Between wand and welt," "When he emerged–," and "Eye-shaped, mouth-shaped" (2000), Glori Simmons for "Graft" (2001), Patricia Goedicke for "Hole"(2002), Mary Molinary for “from Eve’s Epistle to Lilith” and “Ashes of burned manuscripts adrift in the wind, so" (2003), Jessica Goodfellow for “A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland” (2004), Karl Elder for a group of poems from Z Ain't Just for Zabecedarium (2005), Sam Reed for "From The Book of Zeros" (2006), and Susan Tich for "Stork" (2007).