Rita Dove
Dove in December 2017
Born	Rita Frances Dove (1952-08-28)August 28, 1952 (age 73) Akron, Ohio, U.S.
Occupation	Poet author university professor
Education	Miami University (BA) University of Iowa (MFA)
Notable works	Thomas and Beulah The Darker Face of the Earth Sonata Mulattica Playlist for the Apocalypse
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987) United States Poet Laureate (1993–95) Poet Laureate of Virginia (2004–06) 1996National Humanities Medal 2011National Medal of Arts 2019Wallace Stevens Award 2021American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal 2022Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize 2022Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry 2023 National Book Awards lifetime achievement medal forDistinguished Contribution to American Letters
Spouse	Fred Viebahn ​ (m. 1979)​
Children	1

Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet andessayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served asPoet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the firstAfrican 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). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000.^[1] Dove is the second African American to receive thePulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as thePoet Laureate of Virginia^[2] from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at theUniversity of Virginia inCharlottesville, 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.^[3]

Rita Dove was born inAkron, Ohio, to Ray Dove, one of the first African-American chemists to work in the U.S. tire industry (as a research chemist atGoodyear), and Elvira Hord, who achieved honors in high school and would share her passion for reading with her daughter.^[4][5] In 1970, Dove graduated fromBuchtel High School as aPresidential Scholar. Later, Dove graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. fromMiami University in 1973. From 1974 to 1975 she held aFulbright Scholarship fromUniversity of Tübingen, Germany. She received her MFA from theIowa Writers' Workshop at theUniversity of Iowa in 1977.

External videos
C-SPAN Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, 15:43,C-SPAN[6]

Dove taught creative writing atArizona State University from 1981 to 1989. She received the 1987Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In May 1993 she was namedUnited States Poet Laureate^[7] by theLibrarian of Congress, an office she held until 1995. At the age of 40, Dove was the youngest person in the position and the firstAfrican 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, andGwendolyn Brooks had been the last Consultant in Poetry in 1985–86). Early in her tenure as poet laureate, Dove was featured byBill Moyers in a one-hour interview on hisPBS prime-time programBill Moyers Journal.^[8] Since 1989, she has been teaching at theUniversity of Virginia inCharlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020 and is now the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.^[3]

Dove also served as a Special BicentennialConsultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1999/2000, along withLouise Glück andW. S. Merwin. In 2004, then-governorMark Warner ofVirginia appointed her to a two-year position asPoet Laureate of Virginia.^[2] In her public posts, Dove concentrated on spreading the word about poetry and increasing public awareness of the benefits of literature. AsUnited States Poet Laureate, for example, she brought together writers to explore the African diaspora through the eyes of its artists.^[7]

Dove was on the board of theAssociated Writing Programs (AWP) (now "Association of Writers and Writing Programs") from 1985 to 1988, leading the organization as its president from 1986 to 1987. From 1994 to 2000, she was a senator (member of the governing board) of the national academic honor societyPhi Beta Kappa. From 2006 to 2012 she served as a chancellor of theAcademy of American Poets. Since 1991, she has been on the jury of the annualAnisfield-Wolf Book Awards—from 1991 to 1996 together withAshley Montagu andHenry Louis Gates; from 1997 to 2023 with Gates,Joyce Carol Oates,Simon Schama,Stephen Jay Gould (until his death in 2002) andSteven Pinker (who replaced Gould in 2002), and since 2023 with Pinker,Peter Ho Davies,Tiya Miles andNatasha Tretheway.^[9][10] Since 2023 she serves as vice president for literature at theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters.^[11]

In 2000 and 2001 Dove wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", forThe Washington Post.^[12] In the spring of 2018, Dove was named poetry editor ofThe New York Times Magazine.^[13] 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. Her most famous work to date isThomas and Beulah, published byCarnegie-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 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). HerCollected Poems 1974–2004 was released byW. W. Norton in 2016; it carries an excerpt fromPresident Barack Obama's 2011National Medal of Arts commendation on its back cover.

In 1994, she published the playThe Darker Face of the Earth (revised stage version 1996), which premiered at theOregon Shakespeare Festival inAshland, Oregon, in 1996 (first European production:Royal National Theatre, London, 1999). She collaborated with composerJohn Williams on the song cycleSeven for Luck (first performance:Boston Symphony,Tanglewood, 1998, conducted by the composer). For "America's Millennium", theWhite House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Dove contributed — in a live reading at theLincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams' music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentaryThe Unfinished Journey.^[14] She also provided the texts for Pulitzer Prize winnerTania Leon's musical works "Singin' Sepia" (1996),^[15] "Reflections" (2006)^[16] and "The Crossing Choir" (forthcoming),^[17] among other collaborations with multiple composers, most recently on "A Standing Witness" withRichard Danielpour.^[18]

Dove's most ambitious collection of poetry to date,Sonata Mulattica,^[19] was published in 2009; it received the 2010Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Over its more than 200 pages, it "has the sweep and vivid characters of a novel", asMark Doty wrote inO, The Oprah Magazine.^[20]

Dove's 11th collection of poetry,Playlist for the Apocalypse,^[21] was published byW. W. Norton in August 2021.TheNew York Times criticDwight Garner called it "among her best", "poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious."^[22]

Dove editedThe Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry, published in 2011.^[23][24] The collection provoked heated controversy as some critics complained that she valued an inclusive, populist agenda over quality. PoetJohn Olson commented that "her exclusions are breathtaking". Well-known poets left out includeSylvia Plath,Allen Ginsberg,Sterling Allen Brown,Louis Zukofsky,George Oppen,Charles Reznikoff andLorine Niedecker.^[25]

As Dove explained in her foreword and in media interviews, she had originally selected works by Plath, Ginsberg and Brown but these as well as some other poets were omitted against her editorial wishes; their contributions had to be removed from print-ready copy at the very last minute because their publisher forbade their inclusion due to a disagreement withPenguin over permission fees. CriticHelen Vendler condemned Dove's choices, asking "why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value?"^[26] Dove defended her editorial work vigorously in her response to Vendler inThe New York Review of Books,^[27] as well as in wide-ranging interviews withThe Writer's Chronicle,^[28] with poetJericho Brown on the Best American Poetry website,^[29] and withBill Moyers on his public television showMoyers & Company.^[30] TheBoston Review continued the discussion from different angles with an aggressive attack by scholarMarjorie Perloff^[31] and a spirited counter-attack by poet and scholarEvie Shockley, who took on both Vendler and Perloff.^[32]

Dove published a number of books in foreign translations, among them two into German, two into Chinese, three into Spanish, and one each into Norwegian, Macedonian, Italian, French, Dutch and Hebrew, plus numerous translations in foreign magazines. One of her earliest foreign translations was into French byPaol Keineg and published in the Breton review "Bretagnes" in 1976.^[33]

The annual "Rita Dove Poetry Award" was established bySalem College Center for Women Writers in 2004. The documentary filmRita Dove: An American Poet byEduardo Montes-Bradley premiered at theParamount Theater on January 31, 2014.^[34][35]

In 2019, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth, Dove put the African-American poetic reception of Whitman into perspective at a poetry festival in Bogotá, Colombia, during a round-table session withRobert Pinsky.^[36]

Besides her Pulitzer Prize, Dove has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them 29 honorary doctorates – most recently in 2022 from her graduate alma mater,The University of Iowa,^[37] as well as fromEmerson College (2013),^[38]Emory University (2013)^[39]),Yale University (2014),^[40]Harvard University (2018),^[41]Smith College (2018),^[42] andThe University of Michigan (2018).^[43] In 2016, she was the commencement speaker atThe University of Virginia, which traditionally does not bestow honorary degrees.^[44] Among the other institutions of higher learning that granted her honorary doctorates are her undergraduate alma materMiami University,Knox College,Tuskegee University,University of Miami (Florida),Washington University in St. Louis,Case Western Reserve University,The University of Akron,Arizona State University,Boston College,Dartmouth College,Spelman College,The University of Pennsylvania,The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,University of Notre Dame,Northeastern University,Columbia University,SUNY Brockport,Washington & Lee University,Howard University, thePratt Institute,Skidmore College andDuke University.^[45]

Dove received the Golden Plate Award of theAmerican Academy of Achievement in 1994,^[46][47] theNational Humanities Medal /Charles Frankel Prize from President Bill Clinton in 1996,^[48] the 3rd AnnualHeinz Award in the Arts and Humanities in 1997,^[49] and more recently, the 2006 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service in Literature,^[50] the 2007 Chubb Fellowship at Yale University,^[51] the 2008Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award,^[52] the 2009 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal,^[53] the 2009 Premio Capri^[54] and the 2011National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.^[55][56][57] In 2014, she was honored with the Carole Weinstein Prize in poetry^[58] and in 2015, as the first American, with the Poetry and People Prize inGuangdong, China. In 2016, she received theStone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement fromOregon State University.^[59]Collected Poems 1974–2004, released in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award,^[60] the winner of theNAACP Image Award in poetry and winner of the 2017 Library of Virginia Poetry Award.^[61] Also in 2017, she received theCallaloo Lifetime Achievement Award,^[62] followed in 2018 byThe Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement^[63] and in 2019 by theWallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets,^[64] the North Star Award (theHurston-Wright Legacy Award for lifetime achievement),^[65] the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University,^[66] and the Langston Hughes Medal from City College of New York.^[67]

Since 2015, Rita Dove's poem "Cozy Apologia" has been a part of theWJEC EdquasGCSE English Literature specification in England and Wales, featuring in its poetry anthology.^[68]

In 2021, Dove received the gold medal in poetry^[69] from theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, the academy's highest honor, as the 16th poet (and only the 3rd female and 1st African-American) in the medals' 110-year history. The other fifteen poets who have received the medal since 1911 wereJames Whitcomb Riley,Edwin Arlington Robinson,Robert Frost,Marianne Moore,Conrad Aiken,William Carlos Williams,W. H. Auden,John Crowe Ransom,Archibald MacLeish,Robert Penn Warren,Richard Wilbur,John Ashbery,W. S. Merwin,Mark Strand andLouise Glück.

In 2022, an official portrait of Dove by photographer Sanjay Suchak, commissioned by the University of Virginia, was unveiled and is now prominently displayed in the front room of the university's historic Pavilion VII (Colonnade Club) on the West Lawn.^[70] Also in 2022, she won the Library of Virginia Poetry Award forPlaylist for the Apocalypse^[71] and received two more lifetime achievement recognitions: a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation^[72] and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.^[73]

On Nov. 15, 2023, during the 74thNational Book Awards ceremony in New York, Dove received theNational Book Foundation'sMedal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters as only the fourth poet in this lifetime achievement category, afterGwendolyn Brooks in 1994,Adrienne Rich in 2006 andJohn Ashbery in 2011.^[74] This was followed by anAcademy of American Poets Leadership Award^[75] and the Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature from Mercer University^[76] in 2024.

Dove is a member of theAmerican Philosophical Society,^[77] theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, where she currently serves as vice president for literature during the 2023 to 2026 board term,^[11] theFellowship of Southern Writers andPEN American Center. She was inducted into theOhio Women's Hall of Fame in 1991,^[78] and in 2018 she was named one of theLibrary of Virginia'sVirginia Women in History.^[79]

Dove married Fred Viebahn,^[80] a German-born writer, in 1979; they first met in the summer of 1976 when she was a graduate student in the Iowa Writers Workshop and he spent a semester as a Fulbright fellow in the University of Iowa'sInternational Writing Program. They lived inOberlin, Ohio, from 1977 to 1979 while Viebahn taught in theOberlin College German department, and spent extended periods of time in Germany,Ireland andIsrael, before moving to Arizona in 1981.^[81] Their daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn,^[82] was born inPhoenix, Arizona in 1983. The couple are avid ballroom dancers,^[83] and have participated in a number of showcase performances. Since 1989 Dove and her husband have been living inCharlottesville, Virginia.^[84]

This list isincomplete; you can help byadding missing items.(December 2023)

• The Yellow House on the Corner. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press. 1980.ISBN 0915604396.
• Only Dark Spot in the Sky. Tempe: Inland Boat / Porch Publications. 1980.
• Museum. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press. 1983.
• Thomas and Beulah. Carnegie Mellon Press. 1986.ISBN 978-0-88748-021-8.
• Grace Notes: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.ISBN 978-0-393-02719-8.
• Selected Poems. Pantheon/Vintage. 1993.ISBN 978-0-679-75080-2. Included in Harold Bloom'sWestern Canon list.^[85]
• Mother Love. New York: W. W. Norton. 1995.ISBN 978-0-393-31444-1.
• On the Bus with Rosa Parks. New York: Norton. 1999.ISBN 978-0-393-04722-6.
• American Smooth. New York: W. W. Norton. 2004.ISBN 978-0-393-05987-8.
• Sonata Mulattica. New York: W. W. Norton. 2009.ISBN 978-0-393-07008-8.
• Collected Poems 1974-2004. New York, London: W. W. Norton. 2016.ISBN 978-0-393-28594-9.
• Playlist for the Apocalypse. New York: W. W. Norton. 2021.ISBN 978-0-393-86777-0.

• The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. New York:Penguin Books. 2011.ISBN 978-0-14-310643-2.
• The Best American Poetry 2000. New York:Scribner. 2000.ISBN 978-0-7432-0033-2.

• Through the Ivory Gate. Pantheon Books. 1992.ISBN 978-0-679-41604-3.

• Fifth Sunday. University of Kentucky, Callaloo Fiction Series. 1985.ISBN 978-0-912759-06-7.

• The Darker Face of the Earth: A Verse Play in Fourteen Scenes (Story Line Press, 1994; revised edition: 1996)

• The Poet's World. Washington, DC: The Library of Congress. 1995.ISBN 9780844408743.

• Steffen, Therese (2001).Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press.ISBN 9780195134407.
• Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. (2003).Conversations with Rita Dove. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.ISBN 9781578065493.
• Pereira, Malin (2003).Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.ISBN 9780252028373.
• Righelato, Pat (2006).Understanding Rita Dove. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.ISBN 9781570036378.
• Roy, Lekha (2023).Towards Post-Blackness: A Critical Study of Rita Dove's Poetry. New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang.ISBN 9781636671796.

• Erickson, Peter. "Rita Dove's Shakespeares." In Marianne Novy (ed.),Transforming Shakespeare. New York: St. Martin's, 1999.
• Harrington, Walt, "The Shape of Her Dreaming: Rita Dove Writes a Poem." InIntimate Journalism. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997
• Keller, Lynn. "Sequences Testifying for 'Nobodies': Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah and Brenda Marie Osbey's Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman." InForms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• McDowell, Robert. "The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove." In James McCorkle (ed.),Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1990.
• Meitner, Erika. "On Rita Dove." In Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker (eds),Women Poets on Mentorship. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008
• Shoptaw, John. "Segregated Lives: Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah." In Henry Louis Gates Jr (ed.),Reading Black, Reading Feminist. London: Penguin, 1990
• Galgano, Andrea. "Rita Dove. La grazia esatta" inFrontiera di Pagine II, pp. 723–734. Roma: Aracne, 2017
• Apolloni, Ag.Poetry is a kind of dance (Interview with Rita Dove). Symbol, No 9/2017. Link:Poetry is a kind of dance
• Young, Kevin. "The Art of Poetry. No. 113." Interview with Rita Dove. InThe Paris Review No 243 (Spring 2023). pp. 114–148.

Wikiquote has quotations related toRita Dove.

• Appearances onC-SPAN
• The Rita Dove Homepage at University of Virginia, with resource listing of video, articles etc. Retrieved November 2, 2010
• Audio: Rita Dove at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2010: "How Does a Shadow Shine?" Retrieved November 2, 2010
• Poems by Rita Dove and biography at PoetryFoundation.org. Retrieved November 2, 2010
• Interview: Rita Dove at the Academy of American Poets. Poems, audio, interviews. Retrieved November 2, 2010
• Rita Dove,"The Bridgetower" (poem),The New Yorker, November 24, 2008. Retrieved November 2, 2010
• Essays, poems, interview about Dove atModern American Poetry, University of Illinois. Retrieved November 2, 2010
• "Rita Dove on the Future of Literature"Archived November 7, 2013, at theWayback Machine,The Smithsonian, August 2010
• "Rita Dove: A Selective Bibliography", Project Muse. Retrieved December 1, 2015
• Women of Color, Women of Words biography, Rutgers University. Retrieved April 4, 2018
• Extended Interview: Rita Dove. Interviewed byJeffrey Brown onPBS Newshour, December 2011, on the topic of 20th-century American poetry, as collected inThe Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Retrieved February 11, 2017
• "Rita Dove, U.S. Poet Laureate: A Resource Guide".Research Guides at Library of Congress. July 14, 2020. RetrievedMarch 20, 2025.

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