Onna Solomon of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is the 2009 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 Solomon's "Autism Suite," which appeared in the Fall 2009 issue. The prize award is $3,500.

Over its seventeen year history, the Walsh Prize has gone as often to young poets as to mid- and late-career poets with long publication records. Solomon is a gifted poet we are proud to be recognizing at the beginning of her career. A 2006 graduate of Boston University's graduate program in creative writing, where she worked with Robert Pinsky and Louise Glück and interned at AGNI Literary Magazine, she works as the Program Director for the P.L.A.Y. Project, a national autism education and training center of parents and child development professionals in a play-based, developmental, early intervention model for children with autism. She is a founding member of the Huron River Arts Initiative, an arts collective that produces concerts and theatrical performances.

"Autism Suite" evokes the world of parents of autistic children by embodying its broken syntax and obsessive repetitions: "Those I'm not / think / things I don't / think // I know you know / things I don't / think thoughts I don't." The parent's efforts to understand and reach the child, frustrated at every turn, become an effort to comprehend "What a life holds, / what it's built around" by turning "inward" to the heartbeat, each being's "intrinsic secluded home."

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 2010 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), Susan Tichy for "Stork" (2007), and John Hodgen for .a set of four poems by Hodgen which appeared in the Summer 2008 issue.