Rita Dove.pdf

Rita Dove (b. 1952) received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for her third poetry collection, Thomas and Beulah, and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993­–1995. She is the author of a novel, a book of short stories, essays, and numerous volumes of poetry, most recently Sonata Mulattica (2009), Collected Poems 1974-2004 (2016) and Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021). Her drama The Darker Face of the Earth opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1996 and the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1997, followed by its 1999 European début at the Royal National Theatre in London. Seven for Luck, a song cycle with music by John Williams, premiered in 1998, and her 2021 song cycle A Standing Witness, 14 poems with music by Richard Danielpour, was performed by Susan Graham at Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, and other venues. The editor of The Best American Poetry 2000 and The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry (2011), she also served as poetry columnist for The Washington Post and poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine. Dove’s most recent accolades include the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award; the American Academy of Arts & Letters’ 2021 Gold Medal in poetry; the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation; and the Bobbitt Prize for lifetime achievement from the Library of Congress. She is the recipient of a National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and a National Medal of Arts from President Obama, making her the only poet ever to receive both. To date, 29 honorary doctorates have been bestowed upon Rita Dove. She teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.