Claudia Emerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and the current Poet Laureate of Virginia, will read from her work at Writers in the Library, 7 p.m., Monday, September 27, in UT’s Hodges Library auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. A reception in the Mary E. Greer Room (258 Hodges Library) will follow the reading.

Emerson’s four books, Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997), Pinion, An Elegy (2002), Late Wife (2005), and Figure Studies (2008), were published as part of Louisiana State University Press’s signature series, Southern Messenger Poets, edited by Dave Smith. Late Wife won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Her poems have appeared in 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, and was also a Witter Bynner fellow through the Library of Congress. She was awarded the 2008 Donald Justice Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Emerson is Professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at the University Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Claudia Emerson’s reading is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Department of English and the UT Libraries. For further information contact Marilyn Kallet, Director, UT Creative Writing Program (865-974-6947 or mkallet@utk.edu), or Jeff Daniel Marion, Writer in Residence, UT Libraries (dannymar@earthlink.net).