UNCG Alumna Wins Pulitzer Prize

An alumna of the MFA Writing Program at UNCG has won one of the nation’s top honors.

Claudia Emerson, who received her MFA from UNCG in 1991, has received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Along with a $10,000 grant, Emerson joins a list of previous winners that includes some of the nation’s greatest poets, such as Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks and Theodore Roethke.

Emerson won for her book “Late Wife,” a book in which a woman addresses her first husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Louisiana State University Press calls the book “both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.”

Fred Chappell, UNCG professor emeritus and former poet laureate of North Carolina, was Emerson's teacher for several courses, has read and reviewed her work and remains one of her friends.

"Claudia has always had a clarity about her work," he said from his Greensboro home, "not only in her work, but also in the way she goes about her work. I've always admired that clarity. She had a determination -not to win prizes- but to do the very best work she could, to achieve excellence."

"Late Wife" includes the poem “Artifact:”

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.
You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed—
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.
© 2005 by Claudia Emerson.

While a student at UNCG, Emerson was an active staff member of the MFA Writing Program's literary magazine, the Greensboro Review, serving as poetry editor from 1990 to 1991.

Since her graduation, she has remained connected to the campus, reading here in 2002. Emerson is scheduled to read again on campus at 8 p.m. Sept. 7. The reading will be free and open to the public at a venue to be announced later, said Jim Clark, director of the MFA Writing Program and editor of the Greensboro Review. The September reading was planned before the Pulitzer announcement.

Born in Chattham, Va., Emerson holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia and is an associate professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. She is also the author of “Pharaoh, Pharaoh” and “Pinion, an Elegy.”

The MFA Writing Program at UNCG is one of the oldest such programs in the country: the university began to offer a formal creative writing program in 1965. Since then, faculty members have included esteemed writers such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Randall Jarrell. Current faculty members include novelists Michael Parker and Craig Nova. Distinguished visiting writers have included Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow.

In addition to a distinguished faculty, the program has published “The Greensboro Review,” a literary magazine, for more than 35 years.

For more information on the MFA Writing Program, call 336-334-5459.