English professor wins award for book offering a tour of burial sites related to Edgar Allan Poe

Dr. Sharon Pajka, G-’00, was recognized with the 2024 Saturday Visiter Award during the International Edgar Allan Poe Festival & Awards in Baltimore, Md., earlier this month. She won for her 2023 book, “The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of His Family, Friends and Foes,” which takes readers on a tour of the final resting places of the legendary poet and the colorful characters in his orbit. 

The award — named for a prize that Poe won from a Baltimore periodical that helped launch his writing career — celebrates artists that are continuing his legacy through their work. Other winners included a high school drumline performance inspired by Poe’s mental health struggles and a claymation short depicting Poe’s last days alive.

For Pajka, a professor of English in the School of Language, Education, and Culture, it was an honor for her book just to be nominated alongside such creative projects. And it was a thrill to connect with other Poe devotees from all over and discuss their muse. “He was our first American writer who attempted to make a living through writing. Things weren’t given to him,” says Pajka, who notes that it was through Poe’s enormous abilities and lofty ambitions that he elevated Southern literature.

Of course, his macabre subject matter and mysterious death add to the intrigue. “I’ve always found spooky to be interesting,” Pajka says. Her fascination with Poe began when she was a teenager. Her father would clip out newspaper articles for her about the Poe Toaster, the unidentified figure who always visited Poe’s original grave on his birthday and left behind three roses and a bottle of cognac.

She has long been a believer in grave importance. Growing up with a genealogist for a grandfather made her comfortable with cemeteries as spaces to explore and understand the past. Pajka has brought students to cemeteries for classes, and found that they’re often not sure where to walk. “It’s okay to walk on a grave,” she explains to them.

For Richmond’s Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Pajka developed an annual Poe tour, which highlighted his many connections to those buried there. It was also a place Poe visited, both alone and with his wife, Pajka adds.

What convinced her to search for stories at other cemeteries throughout the South and turn her research into a book was a meeting of the Gallaudet English Program in 2022. Because it fell on Poe’s birthday, Pajka offered up a toast to the poet. This led to a discussion with Provost Khadijat K. Rashid, ’90, about which city “owns” Poe. Was it Baltimore, where he is buried? Or Richmond, where he spent so many formative years? Or was his reach too great to confine to one place?

As Pajka dove into researching this question, she realized she needed to hit the road. “I thought it would be fun to get to know the people I’d read about,” she says.

In her book, she provides biographies of each of the family members, friends, or foes, and follows that with a description of their grave sites. Then Pajka delivers some “Grave Reflections” on what made her visit memorable. She’d read in one of Poe’s letters that his beloved foster mother Frances Allan wore orris root perfume, so she sought out the same scent. “I got to wear that while standing at her grave and experience her the same way Poe would have,” she says. At the grave of Philip Pendleton Cooke, a fellow poet and admirer of Poe’s, Pajka read one of his poems.

These moments bring readers into Poe’s world — and Pajka’s passion for the project. “I became the Poe Toaster to everyone connected to Poe,” she says.