Rita Frances Dove

• Rita Dove was born on Akron, Ohio on August 28, 1952.
• She is the second born of four children by Ray and Elvira Dove.
• Her father was the first to go to college earning a master degree in chemistry.  Her father was working as an elevator operator for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company because he could not get hired as research scientist, but eventually, her father broke the color barrier and became the first African American chemist to working for Goodyear.
• Her family enjoyed listening to music daily, their record collection included works ranging from folk songs to chamber music.  Rita begun taking cello lessons at the age of ten.  Books were well presented in her home and during her childhood she thought of books as her companions.  Her parents strictly limited the time her, her brothers and sisters could watch television but they permitted their children to go the library with one exception that all the books they checked out they had to read.
• At a young age Rita wrote stories and plays that her classmates performed.  She coauthored a comic book with her older brother.
• During her tenth grade year in high school she was having difficulty with her homework assignment in geometry.  She soon came over her problem by visualizing points, lines and planes as elements of the room around her.  Years later she related that experience in a poem entitled "Geometry".
• In 1970 a few months after her trip to the White House as one of the hundred American high school seniors chosen that year as Presidential Scholars, Rita enrolled in Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. A writers' conference she attended during high school with one of her English teachers had shown her that writing could be a career and with that in mind she concentrated in college on English courses.  She also took many German language and literature classes and practiced the cello.
• Dove received a B.A. degree in English from Miami in 1973.  She spent the 1974-75 academic year at the University of Tubingen in West Germany as a Fulbright scholar.  There she met a German born writer and journalist Fred Viebahn.   They married in 1979 and had a daughter, Aviva Chantel, who was born in 1983.
• When she returned from Germany she enrolled at the University of Iowa, where she was a teaching/writing fellow in the Writers' Workshop.  She received a Master of Fine Arts in 1977 from the University of Iowa.
• In the same year she published her first chapbook Ten Poems. In 1980 her second chapbook The Only Dark Spot in the Sky.  Her first book-length poetry collection, based in her master's thesis The Yellow House on the Corner was published in 1980.  From traveling abroad in from 1979 to 1981 inspired Dove's second poetry collection, Museum, which was published in 1983, and her third poetry collection Thomas and Beulah won the Pulitzer Price for Poetry in 1987.  In Museum she used words to capture images the average tourist captured on film.
• In 1981 Dove joined the staff at Arizona State University as an assistant professor.  She was the only African American among the seventy members of the English Department.  She accepted a position as a professor at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1989.  The university named her Commonwealth Professor of English in 1992.
• On October 1, 1993, Dove was named Poet Laureate of the United States for two years and was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.  She is the first African American and the youngest person to receive this honor.  Dove's responsibilities as poet laureate consists of participating in the library's poetry and literature programs, advising the library on literary matters and introducing other poets to the public in the library's annual series of free reading and lectures.  After her term finished, she went back to teaching at the University of Virginia and keeps a tireless schedule of public appearances around the country to promote poetry and literature.

Critic Arnold Rampersad cites "Grape Sherbet" as an example if Dove's "unvarnished remembrance of lost time." Further, he says, "Dove insists on a more austere governance of intimacy than many poets and most people, are willing to concede."

Critic B.J Bolden says, the poem "This Life" is about evolution, a contract of the then and the now.  The speaker has made a journey from the bright innocence of youth to the sober reality of maturity" Dove enhances her theme of life as an emotional and psychological journey with the subtle injection of images of memory."

Critic Adana Bunch says "Even though Dove is a well educated woman, she needs to breake it into simpler terms for us little people who look up to her."
 
  

Honors
Phi Beta Kappa Senator, 1994-2000
Lyndon B. Johnson Lecturer, southwest Texas State University, 1998
Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, 1997
Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, 1997
Chair, Poetry Jury, The 1997 Pulitzer prizes
Featured author on Ugandan postage stamp, Inter-Governmental Philatelic Corporation, 1997
National Association of Women in Education (NAWE) Distinguished Woman Award, 1977
Charles Frankel Prize (National Medal in the Arts), The White House & National Endowment for the Humanities, 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts, 1996
U.S, Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry, Library of Congress (1993 ? 1995)
Host (with Jimmy Carter), gathering of Nobel Laureates in Literature, Cultural Olympiad, Atlanta 1995
Fund for New American Plays Award, The Kennedy Carter, 1995
Renaissance Forum Award, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1994
Distinguished Achievement Medal, Miami University Alumni Association, 1994
Carl Sandburg Award, International Platform Association, 1994
NAACP Great American Artist Award, 1993
Woman of the Year Award, Glamour Magazine, 1993
Literary Lion, New York Public Library, 1991
Phi Beta Kappa poet, Harvard University, 1993
Ohioan Award, 1990, 1994
Fellow, Center for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, 1989
Mellon Fellow, National Humanities Center, 1988-89
Bellagio Residency, The Rockefeller Foundation, 1988
Ohio GovernorÕs Award, 1988
General Electric Foundation Award, 1987
Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 1987
President, Associate Writing Programs, 1986-87
Lavan Younger Poet Award, The Academy of American Poets, 1986
Callaloo Award, 1986
Chair, poetry grants panel, National Endowment for the Arts, 1985
Guggenheim Fellow, 1983-84
Portia Pittman Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, Tuskegee Institute, 1982
International Working Period for Authors Fellow, North-Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Culture and University Bielefeld, 1980
Ohio Arts Council Grants, 1979
National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, 1978
Fulbright Scholar, University Tubingen, 1974-75
Phi Beta Kappa, 1973
Phi Kappa Phi, 1973
National Achievement Scholar, 1970-73
Presidential Scholar, 1970

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