She sets the moving love story of “Thomas and Beulah” against the backdrop of industrialization, war, and the civil right struggles. Gathering together thirty years of work and seven books, this volume compiles her irreverent musings in “Museum” and Rita’s fresh reflections on adolescence in the poem “The Yellow House on the Corner”.

This collection showcases the wide ranging diversity which earned her a National Humanities Medal, a Pulitzer, a National Medal of Art the position of US poet laureate. “Collected Poems: 1974-2004” is a poetry collection that was released in 2016. Rita, in these brilliant poems, treats us to quite the panoply of human endeavor, which are shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance.įrom the opening sequence, called “Cameos”, to the civil rights struggle in the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history. “On the Bus With Rosa Parks” is a poetry collection that was released in 2000. The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and lastly, in the section which most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Rita considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life. So isn’t this just what every lyric poem wishes to be, the poet asks while exploring autobiographical events, most of which are from childhood and the cusp of adolescence, and then she turns to the shadowy areas of memory and regret. This collection’s title serves as an umbrella for the intimate concerns expressed in the forty-eight poems in music, grace notes are those that are added to the basic melody, the embellishments which, if sung or played at the right moment with exactly the right touch, can break your heart. “Grace Notes: Poems” is a poetry collection that was released in 1991. The couple are both avid ballroom dancers, and they have participated in a number of showcase performances. In 1983, their daughter, named Aviva Dove-Viebahn, was born in Phoenix, Arizona. They lived in Oberlin, Ohio from 1977 to 1979 as Viebahn taught in the Oberlin College’s German department, and spent extended periods of time in places such as Israel, Germany, and Ireland before they moved to Arizona in 1981. In 1979, she married Fred Viebahn, who is a German born writer, having first met him 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. In 2022 alone she won the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the National Medal of Arts, in 2019, she won the Wallace Stevens Award, and in 2021 she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. She was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 until 2006. In 1996, she won the National Humanities Medal. In 1987, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, making her the second African American to do so. Rita also received an appointment as the “special consultant in poetry” for the Library of Congress’ bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. And at the age of 40, she was also the youngest person in the position. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by one act of Congress in 1986. She is a trained classical cellist and violist da gamba.įrom 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. In 1989, she started teaching at the University of Virginia. Rita, from 1981 until 1989, taught creative writing at Arizona State University. In 1977 she got her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She held a Fulbright Scholarship in 19 from University of Tubingen, Germany.

In 1973, she graduated summa cum laude with her BA from Miami University. Rita graduated as a Presidential Scholar from Buchtel High School, in 1970. She was born to Ray Dove, one of the first African-American chemists to work in the US tire industry (as a research chemist at Goodyear), and Elvira Hord, who achieved honors during high school and would later share her own passion for reading with her daughter. On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetryįurious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry Writer in the Library: 41 Writers Reveal How They Use Libraries to Develop Their Skill, Craft & Careers

Real Things: An Anthology of Popular Culture in American Poetry

Adolescence rita dove