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The 2025 title in the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series is Garden City by Sara Elkamel. Elkamel holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund and Akashic Books, 2021). She lives in Cairo.
“Garden City is a lapidary, fecund investigation of the lives of women: mothers and kittens, sisters and angels—as well as female prisoners of the state, who coexist in a temporally synesthetic lockdown between pharaonic and contemporary Egypt,” writes Ken Chen. The book's dynamic figures and the poet's dreamlike descriptions of them are rife with struggle, and rich with life.
The Chad Walsh Chapbook Series was established in 2018 with the support of Alison Walsh Sackett and her husband Paul in honor of Ms. Sackett's father, the poet Chad Walsh, a co-founder in 1950 of the Beloit Poetry Journal.
(From 1993-2017, the magazine awarded The Chad Walsh Prize to a single poem published during the previous year.)
The series is open to any poet writing in English, regardless of publication history, and the poet whose manuscript we select receives $2,500 and 50 author copies of their chapbook, which is distributed to BPJ subscribers and sold separately in a print run of approximately 1,500. See submission guidelines for more information.
