Rita Frances Dove

Scholarship from Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Germany.

[edit] Career
Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989. She received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and in 1993, at age 41, she was named Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress, an office she held from 1993 to 1995 not only as the youngest person, but also as the first and to date only African American. Gwendolyn Brooks had been the last Consultant in Poetry in 1985-86, prior to U.S. Congress action renaming the position Poet Laureate.
Rita Dove went on to serve as Special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1999/2000, along with Louise Glück and W. S. Merwin, and in 2004 then-governor Mark Warner appointed her to a two-year position as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In her public posts Dove concentrated on spreading the word about poetry and increasing public awareness of the benefits of literature. As Poet Laureate, she also brought together writers to explore the African diaspora through the eyes of its artists. Since 1989 she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she holds the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English.
Dove’s work cannot be pinned down with regard 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. She has published eight volumes of poetry (most recently "American Smooth", 2004), a book of short stories ("Fifth Sunday", 1985), a collection of essays ("The Poet's World", 1995), the novel "Through the Ivory Gate" (1992) and the play "The Darker Face of the Earth" (1994; 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 Love" (first performance: Boston Symphony, Tanglewood, 1998, conducted by the composer), and 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". Dove's next poetry book, "Sonata Mulattica", is forthcoming in the spring of 2009.
Besides her Pulitzer Prize, she has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them 22 honorary doctorates, the 1996 National Humanities Medal / Charles Frankel Prize, the 3rd Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities in 1997, and most recently, the 2006 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service in Literature and, in 2008, the Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award. From 1994-2000 she was a senator (member of the governing board) of the national academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa, and she is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

[edit] Personal life
Dove lives in Charlottesville with her husband, the German-born writer Fred Viebahn. They have one daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn (born 1983).