Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. She served as poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995, becoming the first African American appointed to the position after it was established in 1986. In 1987, she became the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Dove was special consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress during its bicentennial year (1999–2000) and served as Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has been teaching at the University of Virginia since 1989.
Rita Dove was born on August 28, 1952, in Akron, Ohio. Her father, Ray Dove, was one of the first African-American chemists to work in the U.S. tire industry as a research chemist at Goodyear, while her mother, Elvira Hord, achieved honors in high school and would share her passion for reading with her daughter.
Dove graduated from Buchtel High School in 1970 as a Presidential Scholar and received a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Miami University in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, she held a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Tübingen in Germany. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977.
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 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. 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, since 2020, is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
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. In 2004, then-governor Mark Warner 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.
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. From 1994 to 2000, she was a senator (member of the governing board) of the national academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. From 2006 to 2012 she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. 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.
In 2000 and 2001, Dove wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", for The Washington Post. 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. 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. 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.
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. The New York Times critic Dwight Garner called it "among her best", "poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious."
Dove edited The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry, published in 2011. The collection provoked heated controversy as some critics complained that she valued an inclusive, populist agenda over quality. Poet John Olson commented that "her exclusions are breathtaking". Well-known poets left out include Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Sterling Allen Brown, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker.
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?" Dove defended her editorial work vigorously in her response to Vendler in The New York Review of Books, as well as in wide-ranging interviews with The Writer's Chronicle, with poet Jericho Brown on the Best American Poetry website, and with Bill Moyers on his public television show Moyers & Company. The Boston Review continued the discussion from different angles with an aggressive attack by scholar Marjorie Perloff and a spirited counter-attack by poet and scholar Evie Shockley, who took on both Vendler and Perloff.
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.
The annual "Rita Dove Poetry Award" was established by Salem College Center for Women Writers in 2004. The documentary film Rita Dove: An American Poet by Eduardo Montes-Bradley premiered at the Paramount Theater on January 31, 2014.