Susan Tichy of Fairfax, Virginia and Westcliffe, Colorado, is the 2007 winner of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s 15th annual $3000 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 the poem "Stork," which appeared in the Summer 2007 issue.

Although the Walsh Prize is awarded for a single poem, Tichy is an old friend of the BPJ's. We published her "A Meditation in Perthshire, Scotland" in our Fall 1981 issue, and she's appeared in our pages regularly ever since. She is the author of A Smell of Burning Starts the Day (Wesleyan, 1988) The Hands in Exile (Random House, 1983), and most recently of Bone Pagoda (Ahsahta Press, 2007), of which Marion K. Stocking writes in our Fall 2007 issue, "I know no other poetry so rigorous in disciplining its language, its syntax, its very music to honor 'the first and final location of every war: the body.'"

"Stork" inhabits a similar territory of love, war, and loss, moving parataxically, sometimes from line to line, through time and between conflict zones and the mountain where the beloved the poem addresses has fallen to his death. "This is how I must learn to describe peace," the grieving speaker instructs herself,

          A white stork down by the fish ponds

          And a blond man in a bathing suit
          With an Uzi propped on his hipbone

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), and Sam Reed for "From The Book of Zeros" (2006) .