Rita Dove

At 71 years old, Rita Dove physical status not available right now. We will update Rita Dove's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

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.

Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.

Early life

Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, to Ray Dove, one of the first African-American chemists to work in the U.S. tire industry (as a research chemist at Goodyear), and Elvira Hord, who achieved honors in high school and would share her passion for reading with her daughter. In 1970, Dove graduated from Buchtel High School as a Presidential Scholar. Later, Dove graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Miami University in 1973. From 1974 to 1975 she held a Fulbright Scholarship from University of Tübingen, Germany. Some of her poems, translated by Paol Keineg, were published in French in the Breton magazine Bretagnes in 1976. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977.

Personal life

Dove married Fred Viebahn, 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. Their daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn, was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1983. The couple are avid ballroom dancers, and have participated in a number of showcase performances. Dove and her husband live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Source

Career

Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989. She was honoured with the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987. The Librarian of Congress named her United States Poet Laureate in May 1993, an office she occupied until 1995. Dove, the first African American since the name was changed to Poet Laureate, was the first non-white Consultant in Poetry from 1976 to 1978, and Gwendolyn Brooks was the last Consultant in Poetry from 1985 to 1986. Dove was first portrayed by Bill Moyers in a one-hour interview with PBS prime-time writer Bill Moyers Journal early in her career as poet laureate. She has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she served as the Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993-2020 and is now the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.

Rita Dove, as well as Louise Glück and W. S. Merwin, served as a Special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1999/2000. Mark Warner, the state's second governor, was named Poet Laureate of Virginia in 2004. Dove's public speakingswoman concentrated on spreading the word about poetry and raising public knowledge of the benefits of literature. For example, she brought together writers to explore the African diaspora through the eyes of its artists.

Dove served on the board of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP), now the Association of Writer and Writing Programs), from 1985 to 1988, chairing the association as its president from 1986 to 1987. Senator Phi Beta Kappa's national academic honor society from 1994 to 2000 served as a senator (member of the executive board) from 1994 to 2000. She served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2012. Since 1991, she has been on the jury of the annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards—from 1991 to 1996 with Ashley Montagu and Henry Gates; and since 1997 with Gates, Joyce Oates, Stephen Schama, Stephen Jay Gould (who died in 2002) and Steven Pinker (who replaced Gould in 2002).

For the Washington Post, Dove wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice" from 2000 to 2001. Dove was named poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine in the spring of 2018. She resigned from the position in August 2019 after writing almost fifty columns in which she argued for new American poetry.

Dove's writings are not restricted to a specific period or school in contemporary literature; her numerous subjects and the precise poetic language with which she conveys complex emotions defy simple categorization. Thomas and Beulah, a collection of poems loosely based on her maternal grandparents' lives for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, is her best-known work to date. 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 book, Through the Ivory Gate (1992). W. W. Norton's Collected Poems 1974–2004 was released in W.W. Norton in 2016, but it includes an excerpt from President Barack Obama's 2011 National Medal of Arts ode, which appears on the back cover.

The Darker Face of the Earth, a 1994 revivalist stage version of the Inferno, Oregon's first European performance: Royal National Theatre, London, 1999). On the song cycle Seven for Luck, she collaborated with composer John Williams (first performance: Boston Symphony, Tanglewood, 1998, conducted by the composer). Ms. Dove authored "America's Millennium," the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's commemoration, as a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey.

Sonata Mulattica, Dove's most ambitious collection of poetry to date, was published in 2009; it received the 2010 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. "has the sweep and vivid characters of a novel," it says in O. The Oprah Magazine.

W. W. Norton's 11th collection of poetry, Playlist for the Apocalypse, was published in August 2021. "Among her best," a New York Times columnist Dwight Garner said, "poems that are by turns delicate, witty, and audacious."

Dove edited The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry, a collection of twentieth-century American poetry, which was released in 2011. Some commentators had expressed skepticism about the collection's inclusion, populist ideology over quality. "Her exclusions are astounding," Poet John Olson said. Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Sterling Brown, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Lorine Niedecker were among the notable poets left out.

Dove's introduction and in press interviews revealed that she had originally selected works by Plath, Ginsberg and Brown, but that, as well as other writers, had to be deleted from print-ready copies at the last minute due to a dispute with Penguin over permission fees; they had originally selected these as well as other poets who had been omitted against her editorial goals; but now that they were rejected from print-ready copies at the very last minute. "Why are we being asked to try so many poets of little or no lasting value?" critic Helen Vendler criticized Dove's choices. In her reaction 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 & Company, Dove defended her editorial work. The Boston Review continued the discussion from various angles, with scholar Marjorie Perloff's virulent attack and poet and scholar Evie Shockley's spirited counter-attack on Vendler and Perloff.

During a round-table discussion with Robert Pinsky, Dove brought the African-American poetic reception of Whitman into focus.

Source