Claudia Emerson

American academic, writer and poet

Claudia Emerson (January 13, 1957 – December 4, 2014) and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008. She received her BA in English from the University of Virginia in 1979 and her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991.

Emerson published eight poetry collections through Louisiana State University Press's Southern Messenger Poets series: Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), Pinion: An Elegy (2002), Late Wife (2005), Figure Studies: Poems (2008), Secure the Shadow (2012), Impossible Bottle (2015), The Opposite House (2015) and Claude before Time and Space (2018). In addition to her collections, Emerson's work has been included in such anthologies as Yellow Shoe Poets, The Made Thing, Strongly Spent: 50 Years of Shenandoah Poetry, and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia. Emerson served as poetry editor for the Greensboro Review and a contributing editor for the literary magazine Shenandoah. In 2002, Emerson was Guest Editor of Visions International (published by Black Buzzard Press). On August 26, 2008, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Virginia, by then Governor Timothy M. Kaine and served until 2010. In 2008, she returned to Chatham Hall to serve as The Siragusa Foundation's Poet in Residence. She taught at several colleges including Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia and Randolph Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. She spent over a decade at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, as an English professor and the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry. In 2013, Emerson joined the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, where she taught until her death in 2014 from colon cancer at age 57.

Pharaoh, Pharaoh. LSU Press. 1997. Claude before Time and Space. LSU Press. 2018. .