All of Claudia Emerson’s books, Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), Pinion, An Elegy (2002), Late Wife (2005), Figure Studies (2008), and Secure the Shadow (2012) were published as part of Louisiana State University Press’s signature series, Southern Messenger Poets, edited by Dave Smith. Her forthcoming collection, The Opposite House, will also be part of the series.  Late Wife won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She also edited the 2010 Best New Poets anthology. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, New England Review, and other journals.  An advisory and contributing editor for Shenandoah, Emerson has been awarded individual artist’s fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts; she was a Witter Bynner fellow through the Library of Congress and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2012. A recent inductee into the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she was also awarded the 2008 Donald Justice Award from the organization. Former Poet Laureate of Virginia, she teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.