Rita Dove

Rita Dove is an American poet who served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995, the first African American woman ever to hold that position and, at forty years old, the youngest Poet Laureate ever appointed. Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952, she studied at Miami University of Ohio, the University of Tübingen in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Dove's poetry collection Thomas and Beulah (1986) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and chronicles the lives of her maternal grandparents from their Southern roots through their migration to the industrial North. Her other major collections include The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Grace Notes (1989), Mother Love (1995), and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). She is also the author of a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992), and the verse drama The Darker Face of the Earth. Dove received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2023, the National Medal of Arts, and numerous other honours. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she has taught for many years. She lives in Charlottesville.