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), which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Pinion, an Elegy (2002); and Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997). Two posthumous poetry collections, The Opposite House and Impossible Bottle, were published by Louisiana State University Press in 2015. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, New England Review, Blackbird, and other journals. 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 Guggenheim Fellowship (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