Claudia Emerson is Professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She is the author of three books: Late Wife (2005), Pinion, An Elegy (2002), and Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), all from Louisiana State University Press. Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, and New England Review.  

Photo by Barry Fitzgerald