POET KARL ELDER WINS 2005 CHAD WALSH POETRY PRIZE

Poet Karl Elder,

the Fessler Professor of Creative Writing and Poet in Residence at Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, just informed me that he has won the 2005 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal for a set of his poems published in the magazine under the title  "Z Ain't Just for Zabecedarium." You may remember that Elder talked about his abecedarium and their reverse, the zabecedarium, in our interview with him some weeks ago. You may remember that his newest book, Mead, published recently by Marsh River Editions and discussed in the interview, collects twenty-six of his experiments in abecedarium.

Elder learned of the award in a letter from the Beloit Poetry Journal. The letter reads, in part:

It gives us great pleasure to tell you that the Editorial Board of the Beloit Poetry Journal has decided to award you the 2005 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize... for the set of poems from "Z Ain’t Just for Zabecedarium" that appeared our Summer 2005 issue.

Chad Walsh, poet, editor, and writer, was one of the founders of our magazine in 1950; his youngest daughter, Alison Walsh Sackett, along with her husband Paul, provides the money for this prize to honor her father’s memory....

We will announce this award in our Spring 2005 issue, due out in late February, and before that on our web site, www.bpj.org. We would also like to have it reported in the March/April 2006 issue of Poets & Writers....

To select the Walsh Prize winner, the editorial board members reread the poems we’ve published in the last year and nominate a favorite. Ordinarily, we then discuss at length our reasons for selecting each of them. This year, that discussion was abbreviated by our unanimity in choosing the zabecedariums, our pleasure in whose scintillations is enhanced by our sense of the poems’ place in the evolution of your work.

Your BPJ family extends its exuberant congratulations.

The letter was signed by John Rosenwald and Lee Sharkey, editors of the Beloit Poetry Journal.

We extend our own exuberant congratulations to Karl, too.