Born August 28, 1952, in Akron, Ohio, Rita Frances Dove grew up as one of four children in a middle-class, African-American family where the value of books and education were stressed continually. Her father, Ray, was the first African-American research chemist in the history of the American rubber tire industry. Shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she was ranked one of the top hundred high school students in the country and invited to the White House as a Presidential Scholar. In 1973, she received a bachelor╒s degree at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Although her parents wanted her to be a lawyer, she realized in her junior year that she was destined to be a writer. After graduating from college, she received a Fulbright Fellowship and attended the University of Tƒbingen, West Germany 1974-75, where she delighted in studying American foreign policy from a foreign perspective. Back in the U.S., she enrolled in the Iowa Writers╒ Workshop and earned an M.F.A. in 1977. In 1979 she married Fred Viebahn, a German-born novelist.
Dove╒s poetry began to appear in major periodicals in 1974 and touched on many different subjects. As she said once to an interviewer, ╥no subject is essentially boring; and no topic unfit for a poem.╙ Among her early works were Ten Poems, 1977, and The Only Dark Spot in the Sky , 1980. The Yellow House on the Corner , 1980, is notable for its poems written from the perspective of slaves. Thomas and Beulah, 1986, a collection of narrative verse named after her maternal grandparents and loosely reminiscent of their lives, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987. Museum, 1983, she has said, ╥is a concentrated attempt to portray the underside of a museum╤the politics behind the artifacts, the stories behind the legends.╙ Other volumes of her poetry include The Other Side of the House, 1988 and Grace Notes, 1989.
Always interested in the artifice of language, Rita Dove understood poetry as dependent upon language╤its sounds and its rhythms as well as its meanings. In addition to poetry, she wrote Fifth Sunday, 1985, a collection of short stories; Through the Ivory Gate, 1992, a novel; and The Darker Face of the Earth, 1994, a verse drama. She began teaching English Literature at the University of Virginia in 1989. She served as poetry editor of Callaloo and as advisory editor of Gettysburg Review and TriQuarterly. She has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim fellowship, 1983, and a Mellon fellowship, 1988. In 1991 she served as a juror in the poetry divisions for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 1993, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the U.S. by the Library of Congress╤the youngest person and first African-American to be so honored.
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