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Associate professor Claudia Emerson has been teaching composition and creative writing at the University of Mary Washington since 1998. Her latest book, 'Late Wife,' won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
Claudia Emerson's writing classes are among the most popular with University of Mary Washington students, who liken nailing a spot in one to belonging to an exclusive club. |
By MICHAEL FELBERBAUM
Associated Press Writer
ON THE WEB: About the book | Official Pulitzer site
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - For three years, Claudia Emerson took her handwritten letters reflecting on her failed marriage of 19 years and her blossoming relationship with her second husband and taped them to the walls of her home and office.
The letters _ never sent to whom they were addressed _ ended up in her book of poetry, "Late Wife," for which the 49-year-old English professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., earned a 2006 Pulitzer Prize, announced Monday.
"It's a very personal book for me," Emerson said of her third published collection. "The book says a lot about my life. ... Sometimes the subjects just present themselves, I process the world through poetry."
For "Late Wife," the Chatham, Va., native drew on the complex emotions of two people trying to rekindle a love they once believed was gone from the world.
Feedback is often scarce in the world of a poet, and for Emerson, winning the Pulitzer Prize "feels very affirming, but it also opens the book up to scrutiny," she said. "It means they thought the book had merit. I worked real hard on this book."
Poetry about her divorce and new husband Kent Ippolito's loss of his first wife to lung cancer comprise the 54-page book published by Louisiana State University Press in September.
"We both came to the relationship with sadness," she said. "I know that for my husband, the risk was doing something public with something very private."
Emerson said the letters to her ex-husband were not those of a vengeful ex-wife.
"I don't think they'd be very good if they had been sharply written," she said. "I think it is sad when a marriage dissolves, even if it wasn't the happiest one."
Emerson points to "Artifact" as a poem that is representative of the collection:
"For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still in the brush."
Emerson is a graduate of the University of Virginia and earned a master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
The prize comes with a cash award of $10,000 and is given by Columbia University on the recommendation of the 18-member Pulitzer board. Juries in each category pick the finalists.
The awards were created under the terms of the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who died in 1911. He endowed the journalism school at Columbia, and dictated that money be set aside for the prizes. The first awards were handed out in 1917.
from the dead; and "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow," Rolin Jones' comedy about a bright yet eccentric young woman who builds a humanlike robot.
