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The 2006 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Late Wife, by Claudia Emerson (Louisiana State University Press)

Lee Bollinger and Claudia Emerson

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger presents Claudia Emerson with the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Winning Work

Late Wife

By

Claudia Emerson

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how the speaker's rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples' respective losses.

The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

(From the book jacket)

 

Biography

Claudia Emerson was born in Chatham, Virginia, in 1957. She earned her bachelor's degree in English from the University of Virginia in 1979, and her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991. She is currently associate professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She has also taught at Washington and Lee University, Danville Community College, and Randolph-Macon Woman's College.

She is the author of three collections of poetry: Late Wife; Pharoah, Pharoah; and Pinion, An Elegy. Her verse has also appeared in numerous literary journals and publications, including Shenandoah, Poetry, Blackbird, Southern Review, Five Points, Visions International, Ploughshares, Chattahoochee Review, and Crazyhorse, among others.

In 1991, Emerson won the Associated Writing Program's Intro Award as well as the Academy of American Poets Prize. She has been awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, as well as the Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry twice, in 1995 and 2002. In 2003, she won the Mary Washington College Alumni Association Outstanding Young Faculty Award.

 

 

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2006:

Dean Young

Elizabeth Alexander

The Jury

Mary Karr(chair )

Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature

Michael Harper

poet and professor

Ted Kooser*

U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006

Winners in Poetry

See All Poetry

2006 Prize Winners

Public Service

The Times-Picayune

For its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper's resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant. (Selected by the Board from the Public Service category, where it was entered.)
Public Service

Sun Herald

For its valorous and comprehensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, providing a lifeline for devastated readers, in print and online, during their time of greatest need.
See All 2006 Winners