Claudia Emerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and English professor at the University of Mary Washington, has been selected to receive a prestigious fellowship awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Emerson is among 180 winners chosen from more than 3,000 applicants. She is one of 10 poets to receive 2011 fellowships, which also were awarded in fiction, general nonfiction, literary criticism and translation.
“I am absolutely thrilled to be honored with this fellowship,” said Emerson. She will use her $40,000 grant for travel, both in the United States and in Italy, and for research and writing for a new book project.
According to the Guggenheim website, the award is “made on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. The Fellowships are awarded to men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”
Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted nearly $290 million in fellowships to more than 17,000 individuals.
During next week’s Conference on Southern Literature, Emerson will be inducted into the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers. She will be welcomed into the fellowship at the April 14-16 conference along with 11 other distinguished writers including Harper Lee, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Emerson won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Late Wife.” She has written five books of poetry, with a sixth forthcoming. A former Virginia poet laureate who joined the UMW faculty in 1998, she holds the Arrington distinguished chair of poetry at Mary Washington. Emerson received the Donald Justice Award for poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2009.