MIAMI, FL – Valerie, the author whose only novel, Job’s Complaint, won both the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize the year it was released, was remembered in a ceremonial ship burial today off the coast of Key Biscayne, Florida. She died of natural causes at her home in South Miami on Thursday night.

Born in California and raised in Miami, she eventually moved to Maine to pursue what she described to friends as “a real writer’s life in a place with no distractions.” It was there that she suffered a devastating accident on icy roads that left her in a persistent vegetative state.