UMW Poet Wins Guggenhiem Fellowship

• UMW Press Release 

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.”

 Emerson won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Late Wife.”