By Peter Galuszka
It’s curious in Virginia and other states how many times true talent emerges from small towns in rural areas. That is the case of Claudia Emerson, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry who now teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Emerson, 57, grew up in the Chatham area in Southside known for its rolling hills, tobacco fields and dairy farms. It’s a stone’s throw from the North Carolina line and is Southern in a different kind of way from, say, Richmond or Tidewater.
That Southerness is a touchstone for Emerson. I admire her finely detailed poems for the way they compress thoughts, imagery and words. The South, she told me in a story I did recently in Style Weekly, “is such a haunted and troubled place. A lot of our troubles are out and about. You know it for what it is I am moved by the context of where we are.”
Her five books draw pictures of birds and turtles, divorce and cancer. Her writing odyssey took her from a private, all-girls school in her hometown to the University of Virginia and back home again where she spent years fixing up country houses in disrepair and holding odd jobs.
Her writing passion was honed at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro which for decades has been the UNC System’s school for the arts. She started writing and teaching and ended up at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg for 15 years.
In 2006, her work, “Late Wife: Poems” won the Pulitzer. She told me she had no idea about it until the phones rang when she was in class and students started screaming in the halls.
I first talked with her after one of my daughters, now a UMW grad, told me of this great teacher who appeared in a poetry class. Emerson has taken a stand against uranium mining in her home area and I was doing an article about it for Slate. Luckily, the uranium idea has been put on indefinite hold.
Emerson moved to VCU’s creative writing program last summer. Richmond is richer for it.
