Claudia Emerson (1957–2014) was the author of five collections of poetry that appeared in her lifetime, all published by Louisiana State University Press as part of their Southern Messenger Poets Series: Secure the Shadow (2012); Figure Studies (2008); Late Wife (2005), winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Pinion, an Elegy (2002); and Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997). Three posthumous poetry collections, Claude before Time and Space (2018), The Opposite House (2015), and Impossible Bottle (2015), were also published by Louisiana State University Press. Her poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Crazyhorse, New England Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. She won numerous awards and fellowships, including the Academy of American Poets Prize (1991), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1994), the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress (2005), and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2011). From 2008–2010 she served as poet laureate of Virginia. Emerson was a professor of English in the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University.  

Photo by Kent Ippolito