Claudia Emerson

On January 13, 1957, Claudia Emerson was born in Chatham, Virginia. Emerson received her BA in English at the University of Virginia and her MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Her books of poetry include Secure the Shadow (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), Figure Studies: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2008), Pinion: An Elegy (Louisiana State University Press, 2002), and Pharaoh, Pharaoh (Louisiana State University Press, 1997).

About her work, poet and critic David Rigsbee writes: "Something claimed ‘in the ear’—a phrase with a Rilkean echo—returns us to the fine way Emerson's poems deliver fidelity and exactitude of detail, the image, often nested or interwoven, of things passing from one state to another. It is a hallmark of her work, and it has the feel of work, as if she were offering up something real to the unreal and uncanny situations that are the occasions of the strongest poems here."

Among her many honors are the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, which she received in 2006 for her book Late Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). She also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She was the poet laureate of Virginia from 2008 to 2010.

She served as poetry editor for the Greensboro Review and contributing editor for Shenandoah and held teaching positions at Washington and Lee University, Randolph-Macon College, the University of Mary Washington, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She died on December 4, 2014, in Richmond, Virginia.

Bibliography

Secure the Shadow (Louisiana State University Press, 2012)
Figure Studies: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2008)
Late Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2005)
Pinion: An Elegy (Louisiana State University Press, 2002)
Pharaoh, Pharaoh (Louisiana State University Press, 1997)