Pulitzer-winning poet, professor

Claudia Emerson, whose book of piercing poems about one marriage ending and another beginning won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, died Thursday in Richmond, Va. She was 57.

The cause was cancer, said Virginia Commonwealth University, where she taught.

Emerson strove to find poetic meaning in her rural roots and small-town upbringing, finding metaphors in the real and spiritual landscape of her native South. Like many Southern writers, she said, she explored the “irony of loss.”

Her book that won the Pulitzer, LateWife, chronicles her journey from one marriage, through solitude and into another marriage. She laments the dissolution of a marriage of 19 years, celebrates her new independence and then addresses her new husband in a sequence of sonnets.

In an interview with PBS in 2006, Emerson said that writing LateWife was a way to deal with her emotions about falling in love with a man whose beloved wife had died of lung cancer. She then looked back on her first marriage and found poetry in it, too.

Besides the Pulitzer, Emerson received the Academy of American Poets Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was poet laureate of Virginia from 2008 to 2010.

Claudia Ann Emerson was born Jan. 13, 1957, in Chatham, Va. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in English and returned to Chatham, where she was a part-time mail carrier and managed a used bookstore.

In 1994, she was hired as an English professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. Last year, she joined Virginia Commonwealth as a professor of creative writing. Her other books include