Jenny Johnson of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is the 2011winner 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 Johnson’s crown of sonnets, “Aria” , which appeared in the Summer 2011 issue.

Johnson is a poet at the beginning of a promising career. After earning a Master of Teaching degree from the University of Virginia in 2002, she taught middle and high school English for several years and served as Associate Director of the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop. A 2011 graduate of  the Warren Wilson College Low-Residency MFA Program for Writers, she is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. Her poem “Ladies’ Arm Wrestling Match at the Blue Moon Diner” was chosen for the Best New Poets 2008: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers. "Aria" will also appear in The Best American Poetry 2012.

“Aria” is a tightly woven poem that makes music of the fracturing of gender. Beginning with a party for a gender queer woman about to have top surgery (“a drum flattened tight”), the poem ranges through a performance in 1902 by “the last castrato,” Eric Dolphy’s “tender glissando” as backdrop for homicides in San Francisco, a 1942 field recording of a nightingale in which RAF bombers on their way to attack Mannheim can be heard in the background, a LeTigre concert, and Aretha Franklin's "(You Make Me Feel LIke) A Natural Woman" as it circles back to a last line that reiterates and resolves its first. Johnson describes the poem as “seven meditations” on “the sounds and restraints that emerge from a queer body . . . a body or voice that has the potential to be unified by its disjunctions."

The Walsh Prize, which this year carries a cash award of $5000, was established in 1993 by Alison Walsh Sackett and her husband Paul in honor of 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.
Previous winners of the Walsh Prize include Albert Goldbarth, Sherman Alexie, Patricia Goedicke, Mary Leader, Janet Holmes, Karl Elder, Susan Tichy, and Charles Wyatt. All poems published in 2012 will be eligible for that year's prize.

All poems published in the BPJ in 2012 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), John Hodgen for .a set of four poems by Hodgen which appeared in the Summer 2008 issue, Onna Solomon for "Autism Suite" (2009), and Charles Wyatt for “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens.”