Claudia Emerson, a Chatham native, University of Virginia graduate and, oh, by the way, an associate professor at Mary Washington University, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry this year, for her work, “Late Wife.”

From the book jacket: “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.”

A sample from 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.