Claudia Emerson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection Late Wife, is set to headline the Spring 2009 session of Spalding University’s Festival of Contemporary Writing, Kentucky’s largest and most prestigious spring-fall reading series. The presentation takes place at 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 26, in the Gallery of the Brown Hotel, 335 W. Broadway. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served; no tickets are required.
Late Wife is a collection of poems chronicling Emerson’s divorce from her first husband, and the occasional uneasiness she feels as the new wife of a widower. The book won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Other works include Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion, an Elegy; and Figure Studies: Poems.
Emerson is the poet laureate of Virginia and a contributing editor of Shenandoah. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, New England Review, and other journals. She is a Professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va.
Emerson’s appearance caps the Spalding MFA Program’s Spring 2009 Festival of Contemporary Writing. Featured authors from past festivals include Ann Patchett, Ernest J. Gaines, Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket), Pico Iyer, Yusef Komunyakaa, W.S. Merwin, Bobby Moresco, Michael Ondaatje, Donna Jo Napoli, Marsha Norman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Heather Raffo, Scott Russell Sanders, Susan Vreeland, Nancy Willard, and Terry Tempest Williams.
The Festival of Contemporary Writing is part of the brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program at Spalding University. Spalding’s brief-residency MFA Program is a four-semester program in creative writing, offering concentrations in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, playwriting, and screenwriting. A summer semester with residency abroad is designed to fit teachers’ schedules. For more information, see www.spalding.edu/mfa.
