Claudia Emerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor of creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, died on December 4. She was 57 years old and had suffered from cancer.
Professor Emerson earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Virginia in 1979. She held a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She joined the faculty at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1994 and taught there for nearly 20 years before accepting an appointment at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013.
Professor Emerson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her poetry collection Late Wife (Louisiana State University Press, 2006). She was the poetry editor for the Greensboro Review and a contributing editor of the literary journal Shenandoah.