Claudia Emerson

2006 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry,
Arrington Chair of Poetry,
and Professor of English

Professor Wins Pulitzer

By Neva S. Trenis
Reprinted from UMW Today, Summer 2006

When the announcement came that Claudia Emerson had won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the phone in the professor's office in Combs Hall started ringing – and didn't stop.

Claudia Emerson’s students recognized her talent before the Pulitzer committee did. When it came time to register for courses taught by the professor of English, they vied to be first in line for her creative writing and poetry sessions.

So when the announcement came this spring that Emerson won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, one UMW student scribbled a note on Emerson’s Combs Hall office door. Combining congratulations with exasperation, the student wrote:

“As if it weren’t hard enough to get in her classes...Pulitzer Prize winner!” The award recognized Emerson’s most recent collection of poems, Late Wife, published in 2005 by Louisiana State University Press.

A collective whoop of congratulations and pride went up for Emerson, 49, not only from University colleagues and friends, but also from the city of Fredericksburg. Its residents woke up to the headline “Professor wins Pulitzer Prize” in the local paper. The editorial page applauded her, friends fêted her, President Anderson hosted a reception in her honor, and the Board of Visitors appointed her Arrington Distinguished Chair of Poetry.

When it comes to the Pulitzer – the highest honor in print journalism, literary achievements and musical compositions – it isn’t just the locals who come calling. The next day, the small-town poet was in big-city newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Later, she was in Newsweek magazine.

Before the April 17, 2006, announcement, Emerson had been quietly processing her life through the prism of metaphor. A native of Chatham, Va., – population 1,300 – she came to the University of Mary Washington in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia and a master of fine arts in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. But her real introduction to poetry came far from the classroom.

After graduating from U.Va. in 1979, Emerson returned to her home in the southside area of Virginia, married a hometown boy, and took a part-time job as a rural mail carrier. She also managed a used bookstore in nearby Danville, Va.

“Not very many people came into that bookstore,” Emerson told The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, “so my life was an interesting one of being bound in this shop with lots of books, and then sometimes getting out on the mail route, and being alone all day long, looking at the landscape.”

Though she had written short stories and songs before, two used books that came into the shop were the catalyst for her poetry venture. After reading Rainer Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and May Sarton’s autobiography-memoir Journal of a Solitude, Emerson was inspired to write poetry, she told Jeffrey Brown of The NewsHour.

“Lots [of books] were traded in, but [those] two had a profound impact on me,” Emerson said.

She wrote furiously during that time, she told The NewsHour, often producing a poem a day. She went on to get her master’s degree, and by the time she graduated in 1991, she had finished Pharaoh, Pharaoh, her first collection. Six years later, it was published.

Emerson taught at Washington and Lee University, Danville Community College and Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. She worked as academic dean at Chatham Hall, the all-girls boarding school from which she graduated in 1975. And she kept writing poetry.

Four years after Emerson arrived at Mary Washington, Louisiana State University Press published her Pinion, An Elegy and nominated it for a Pulitzer.

Emerson’s professional life was flourishing, but within two semesters of coming to Fredericksburg, her 19-year marriage failed.

Six years later, in fall 2005, Late Wife was published. A work in three sections, part one, “Divorce Epistles,” chronicles the dissolution of the marriage. “Breaking up the House” explores solitude and healing. Part three, “Late Wife: Letters to Kent,” is a collection of sonnets written to the new husband whose first, beloved wife died of cancer.

When Late Wife was published last fall, Emerson read from the poems to a standing-room-only crowd of colleagues and friends gathered in Combs Hall. She prefaced her reading of the sonnets to Kent Ippolito, with whom Emerson makes her home in Fredericksburg, by saying, “There was something that kept haunting me about being happy, but only because someone had disappeared before me.”

Late Wife is the most personal of her works. Emerson began writing the poems as hand-written letters to Kent, but as the works progressed, she kept readers in mind as well.

“I was thinking about a former husband and my husband now,” Emerson told The NewsHour. “But I also am aware that, in some ways, I’m putting you, the reader, in that seat, as well, or asking you to be with me in the first person, and maybe relate to some of how I would address that other.”

Emerson's classes are among the most popular at UMW.

In winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Emerson joins a prestigious company of previous recipients, such as former U.S. Poets Laureate Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren and Ted Kooser. Though the Pulitzer Prizes, awarded by the Columbia School of Journalism, were established in 1917, the prize in poetry was first awarded in 1922. Since then, 84 such awards have been given. Emerson is one of 19 women who have won the prize.

Last fall, the Library of Congress awarded Emerson a Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and twice received a Virginia Commission for Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry.

She also has been recognized for her teaching at UMW with the 2003 Alumni Association Outstanding Young Faculty Award and the 2006 Mary Pinschmidt Award. The latter is an award given by graduating seniors to the professor they are most likely to remember as having the greatest impact on their lives.

Students may consider it an honor to be in one of her classes, but they work hard for the distinction. Emerson asks a lot of her students. She asks them to write, despite demanding classes, despite jobs, despite personal crises – write inspiration, write ideas, write words, she tells them – no matter what. Emerson understands what she is asking, because she does it herself – despite a full teaching load, despite office hours, despite departmental committees and all the unseen work that is part of her responsibility at the University.

If she requires students to write 10 poems a semester, she writes 10 poems a semester, not in quest of a Pulitzer, but because that is how she lives and makes sense of her life.

“It has made my life better to write poetry. It can be cathartic, and it can be beautiful and reach people,” Emerson told The NewsHour. “I do encourage my students to try it, to read it, to get inside the genre and see if that’s what they want to do.”

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