The Georgia Review is thrilled to congratulate Rochelle L. Johnson on winning the 2026 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, for her essay “Phantom Pains,” winner of the Georgia Review Prose Prize, judged by Allegra Hyde, and published in The Georgia Review’s Winter 2025 issue.
According to the John Burroughs Association, the award “is given annually to a published nature essay of outstanding natural history writing that presents vivid, first-hand, scientifically accurate accounts of aspects of nature. It serves to perpetuate the writing form and approach of naturalist John Burroughs. As one of the most popular and influential authors of his day, he is credited with creating the modern nature essay. His personal and accessible style, expressed in more than three hundred essays in journals and twenty-three books beginning in 1865, built sympathy with nature throughout the country and had a profound impact on the emerging conservation movement.”
Of Johnson’s essay, the John Burroughs Association writes, “with hard-won candor, Johnson recounts the story of her amputated limb, reassesses her role as a teacher, and discovers deep resonances between her body and the body of the earth. In so doing, she has created an essay that stirs both anguish and hope.”
Rochelle L. Johnson’s nonfiction appears in Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration, The Baltimore Review, and The Revelator. The recipient of Idaho Humanities Council’s 2024 award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities, Johnson chairs the award committee for the Thoreau Prize in Nature Writing and teaches writing and environmental studies at College of Idaho and Bread Loaf School of English. “Phantom Pains” grows out of a book in process.
Johnson will be honored at the 100th anniversary of the John Burroughs Medal on April 13, 2026 in New York City.