| 1 | Name: | Professor Rita Dove | |
| Institution: | University of Virginia | ||
| Year Elected: | 1996 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1952 | ||
Rita Dove served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993-95. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2008 Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2006 Common Wealth Prize, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1996 National Humanities Medal, and Oregon State University's 2016 Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2012 and Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois medal in 2019. Born in Akron, Ohio in 1952, Ms. Dove received her B.A. summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She also held a Fulbright scholarship at the Universität Tübingen in Germany. She has published the poetry collections The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2006), Sonata Mulattica (2009), a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992) essays under the title The Poet's World (1995), and Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (2016). Ms. Dove is also the author of the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London and other theatres. Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Ms. Dove contributed, in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial accompanied by John Williams's music, a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey. As a player of the viola de gamba, Ms. Dove is fond of incorporating music into her poetry. She is currently Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In 2018 she became Poetry Editor at the New York Times Magazine, introducing the readership to a new poem each week. | |||