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April 21, 2006 -- Claudia Emerson, a 1979 graduate of
the University of Virginia, was named the recipient of
the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The prize, which was
announced on Monday, April 17, comes with a $10,000 cash
award.
Previous winners have included some of the most
distinguished voices in American poetry, among them Robert
Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Levine and U.Va. professors
Rita Dove (1987) and Charles Wright (1998).
Emerson was awarded the prize for her collection, “Late
Wife,” which uses a series of unsent letters to chronicle
the breakup of the author’s first marriage and the
development of her relationship with her current husband.
Louisiana State University Press, which published “Late
Wife” and nominated it for the prize, called the
book “both an elegy and a celebration of the rich
present informed by a complex past.”
“I was completely stunned by the news,” Emerson said
of winning the prize. “Stunned, but thrilled and
honored.”
She has published two other collections, “Pharaoh,
Pharaoh,” and “Pinion: An Elegy.” Her
work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including
Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares,
Shenandoah and others.
Emerson recalled some of the professors who inspired her
during her years at U.Va., where she majored in English. “I
adored David Levin, Charles Vandersee and folklore classes
with Chuck Purdue — an independent study with him
actually turned years later into my second book!”
Emerson, who later received her M.F.A. at the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro, is currently associate
professor of English at the University of Mary Washington
in Fredericksburg, Va. She has also taught at Washington
and Lee University, Danville Community College and Randolph-Macon
Women’s College.
In 1991, Emerson won the Associated Writing Program’s
Intro Award and the Academy of American Poets Prize. She
has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
in Poetry and twice received the Virginia Commission for
the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry.
In 2005,
the Library of Congress awarded her a Witter Bynner Fellowship,
which carries a $10,000 prize. In 2003, she won the Mary
Washington College Alumni Association Outstanding Young
Faculty Award.
The jury for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry included
Mary Karr, Michael Harper and Pulitzer Prize-winner Ted
Kooser. The prizes will be awarded at Columbia University
on May 22.
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