Rita Dove - Career, Bibliography, Quotes

Poet, born in Akron, Ohio, USA. She began writing verse when young, but only became serious about poetry while attending Miami University, Ohio. She studied a year in Germany (her husband, Fred Viebahn, was a German playwright and novelist), then earned an MFA at the University of Iowa. She joined the English faculty at the University of Virginia (1989). Her poetry, such as the 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah, and her novels, including Through the Ivory Gate (1992), blend the lyrical and personal with the precise and the contemporary, and her work draws subtly on her experiences as an African-American. In 1993 she became the first African-American poet laureate of the Library of Congress.

Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio, USA) is an African American United States poet and author. from Miami University and her MFA from the University of Iowa. 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.

Career

Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. She received her undergraduate degree in English in 1973 from Miami University of Ohio. Her most famous work is Thomas and Beulah, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1986, a collection of poems based on the lives of her grandparents, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987. She taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989.

Dove served as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, most recently, the 2006 Common Wealth Award, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal.

Bibliography

American Smooth (poems). On the Bus with Rosa Parks (poems). Mother Love (poems). Grace Notes (poems). Thomas and Beulah (poems). Museum (poems). The Yellow House on the Corner (poems).

Quotes

"I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers."