In 1993 Rita Dove was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, becoming the youngest person and first African American to receive the highest honor in American letters.
Born in Akron in 1952, Dove graduated summa cum laude from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1973 before spending two semesters as a Fulbright scholar at Universitate Tubingen in Germany. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977 from the University of Iowa and has since received 20 honorary doctorates from various universities throughout the United States. She was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1987 for her work on her 1986 book “Thomas and Beulah.”
Dove is a Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, German writer Fred Viebahn, and daughter, Aviva. She is the author of several plays, musical collaborations and books including On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999); Mother Love (1995); Grace Notes (1989); andThe Yellow House on the Corner (1980).
Dove has read her poetry at a White House state dinner, was featured on CNN, on NBC’s Today Show, in a Bill Moyer’s Journal prime-time special on PBS dedicated to her and her work and, also on PBS, on the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour (in an interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault), the Charlie Rose Show, and Dennis Wholey’s This is America.
She produced, in collaboration with the Library of Virginia, Shine Up Your Words: A Morning with Rita Dove, a nationally televised one-hour television show with elementary school children about poetry; narrated an NPR program on singer Billie Holiday and the three-part PBS documentary on Southern literature, Tell About the South; filmed a segment with Big Bird for Sesame Street, and appeared repeatedly on Garrison Keillor’s public radio program A Prairie Home Companion.
Photo courtesy of the Beacon Journal.
–Zachary Jackson