Rita Dove

Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist.

In 1970, Dove graduated from Buchtel High School as a Presidential Scholar.

Later, Dove graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Miami University in 1973.

From 1974 to 1975 she held a Fulbright Scholarship from University of Tübingen, Germany.

Her Collected Poems 1974–2004 was released by W. W. Norton in 2016; it carries an excerpt from President Barack Obama's 2011 National Medal of Arts commendation on its back cover.

At the age of 40, Dove was the youngest person in the position and the first African American since the title was changed to Poet Laureate (Robert Hayden had served as the first non-white Consultant in Poetry from 1976 to 1978, and Gwendolyn Brooks had been the last Consultant in Poetry in 1985–86).

Early in her tenure as poet laureate, Dove was featured by Bill Moyers in a one-hour interview on his PBS prime-time program Bill Moyers Journal.

She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977.

Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989.

Dove was on the board of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) (now "Association of Writers and Writing Programs") from 1985 to 1988, leading the organization as its president from 1986 to 1987.

Dove has published eleven volumes of poetry, a book of short stories (Fifth Sunday, 1985), a collection of essays (The Poet's World, 1995), and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992).

She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86).

Her most famous work to date is Thomas and Beulah, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1986, a collection of poems loosely based on the lives of her maternal grandparents, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.

She received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.

Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, to Ray Dove, one of the first African-American chemists to work in the U.S. tire industry (as a research chemist at Goodyear), and Elvira Hord, who achieved honors in high school and would share her passion for reading with her daughter.

Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020 and is now the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.

Since 1991, she has been on the jury of the annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards—from 1991 to 1996 together with Ashley Montagu and Henry Louis Gates; from 1997 to 2023 with Gates, Joyce Carol Oates, Simon Schama, Stephen Jay Gould (until his death in 2002) and Steven Pinker (who replaced Gould in 2002), and since 2023 with Pinker, Peter Ho Davies, Tiya Miles and Natasha Tretheway.

Since 2023 she serves as vice president for literature at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

In May 1993 she was named United States Poet Laureate by the Librarian of Congress, an office she held until 1995.

From 1994 to 2000, she was a senator (member of the governing board) of the national academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1994, she published the play The Darker Face of the Earth (revised stage version 1996), which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, in 1996 (first European production: Royal National Theatre, London, 1999).

She also provided the texts for Pulitzer Prize winner Tania Leon's musical works "Singin' Sepia" (1996), "Reflections" (2006) and "The Crossing Choir" (forthcoming), among other collaborations with multiple composers, most recently on "A Standing Witness" with Richard Danielpour.

She collaborated with composer John Williams on the song cycle Seven for Luck (first performance: Boston Symphony, Tanglewood, 1998, conducted by the composer).

Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000.

Dove also served as a Special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1999/2000, along with Louise Glück and W. S. Merwin.

For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams' music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey.

In 2000 and 2001 Dove wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", for The Washington Post.

In 2004, then-governor Mark Warner of Virginia appointed her to a two-year position as Poet Laureate of Virginia.

In her public posts, Dove concentrated on spreading the word about poetry and increasing public awareness of the benefits of literature.

As United States Poet Laureate, for example, she brought together writers to explore the African diaspora through the eyes of its artists.

From 2006 to 2012 she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Dove's most ambitious collection of poetry to date, Sonata Mulattica, was published in 2009; it received the 2010 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.

Over its more than 200 pages, it "has the sweep and vivid characters of a novel", as Mark Doty wrote in O, The Oprah Magazine.

Dove's 11th collection of poetry, Playlist for the Apocalypse, was published by W. W. Norton in August 2021.

In the spring of 2018, Dove was named poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine.

After writing nearly fifty columns in which she championed new American poetry, she resigned from the position in August 2019.

Dove's work cannot be confined to a specific era or school in contemporary literature; her wide-ranging topics and the precise poetic language with which she captures complex emotions defy easy categorization.