Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. 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). 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 the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia[2] from 2004 to 2006. 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.[3]
Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989. She received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In May 1993 she was named United States Poet Laureate[7] by the Librarian of Congress, an office she held until 1995. 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.[8] 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.[9]
In 2000 and 2001 Dove wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", for The Washington Post.[14][15] In the spring of 2018, Dove was named poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine.[16] 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 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 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). 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.
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 collaborated with composer John Williams on the song cycle Seven for Luck (first performance: Boston Symphony, Tanglewood, 1998, conducted by the composer). 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.[17] She also provided the texts for Pulitzer Prize winner Tania Leon's musical works "Singin' Sepia" (1996),[18] "Reflections" (2006) [19] and "The Crossing Choir" (forthcoming),[20] among other collaborations with multiple composers, most recently on "A Standing Witness" with Richard Danielpour.[21]
Dove's most ambitious collection of poetry to date, Sonata Mulattica,[22] 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.[23]
Dove's 11th collection of poetry, Playlist for the Apocalypse,[24] was published by W. W. Norton in August 2021. TheNew York Times critic Dwight Garner called it "among her best", "poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious."[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 with Penguin over permission fees. Critic Helen Vendler condemned Dove's choices, asking "why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value?"[29] Dove defended her editorial work vigorously in her response to Vendler in The New York Review of Books,[30] as well as in wide-ranging interviews with The Writer's Chronicle,[31] with poet Jericho Brown on the Best American Poetry website,[32] and with Bill Moyers on his public television show Moyers & Company.[33] The Boston Review continued the discussion from different angles with an aggressive attack by scholar Marjorie Perloff[34] and a spirited counter-attack by poet and scholar Evie Shockley, who took on both Vendler and Perloff.[35]
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 by Paol Keineg and published in the Breton review "Bretagnes" in 1976.[36]
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 with Robert Pinsky.[39]
Since 2015, Rita Dove's poem, Cozy Apologia, has been a part of the WJEC EdquasGCSE English Literature specification in England and Wales, featuring in its poetry anthology.[71]
In 2022, an official portrait of Dove by photographer Sanjay Suchak, commissioned by the University of Virginia, was unveiled and is prominently displayed in the front room of the university's historic Pavilion VII (Colonnade Club) on the West Lawn.[73] Also in 2022, she won the Library of Virginia Poetry Award for Playlist for the Apocalypse[2] and received two more lifetime achievement recognitions: a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation [74] and
the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.[75]
Dove married Fred Viebahn,[83] 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's International Writing Program. They lived in Oberlin, Ohio, from 1977 to 1979 while Viebahn taught in the Oberlin College German department, and spent extended periods of time in Germany, Ireland and Israel, before moving to Arizona in 1981.[84] Their daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn,[85] was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1983. The couple are avid ballroom dancers,[86] and have participated in a number of showcase performances. Since 1989 Dove and her husband have been living in Charlottesville, Virginia.[87]
The Poet's World (Washington, DC: The Library of Congress, 1995)
Scholarly books on Dove's work
Steffen, Therese. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Conversations with Rita Dove. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003
Pereira, Malin. Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Righelato, Pat. Understanding Rita Dove. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.
Roy, Lekha. Towards Post-Blackness. A Critical Study of Rita Dove's Poetry. New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, 2023.
Various other secondary literature (incomplete)
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." In Intimate 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." In Forms 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" in Frontiera di Pagine II, pp. 723–734. Roma: Aracne, 2017
^"2019 Summit Highlights Photo". 2019. Rita Dove, former United States Poet Laureate, presenting the Golden Plate Award to Nadia Murad, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, during the Banquet of the Golden Plate Award gala at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City.