RICHMOND, Va. — Claudia Emerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, has died. She was 57.
The Richmond university says Emerson died early Thursday morning after a long battle with cancer.
Emerson won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection "Late Wife," a collection of handwritten letters reflecting on her failed marriage of 19 years and her blossoming relationship with her second husband, Kent Ippolito.
The Chatham, Virginia, native was named as the state's poet laureate, an honorary two-year post, by then-Gov. Tim Kaine in 2008.
Emerson earned an English degree at the University of Virginia in 1979 and a master's degree in fine arts in creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991.
