Dove taught creative writing at
Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989. She received the 1987
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In May 1993 she was named
United States Poet Laureate by the
Librarian of Congress, an office she held until 1995. At the age of 40, Dove was the youngest person in the position and the first
African American since the title was changed to Poet Laureate (
Robert Hayden had served as the first non-white Consultant in Poetry from 1976 to 1978, and
Gwendolyn Brooks had been the last Consultant in Poetry in 1985–86). Early in her tenure as poet laureate, Dove was featured by
Bill Moyers in a one-hour interview on his
PBS prime-time program
Bill Moyers Journal. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the
University of Virginia in
Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020 and is now the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing. In her public posts, Dove concentrated on spreading the word about poetry and increasing public awareness of the benefits of literature. As
United States Poet Laureate, for example, she brought together writers to explore the African diaspora through the eyes of its artists. Since 2023 she serves as vice president for literature at the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2000 and 2001 Dove wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice", for
The Washington Post. In the spring of 2018, Dove was named poetry editor of
The New York Times Magazine. After writing nearly fifty columns in which she championed new American poetry, she resigned from the position in August 2019. Dove's work cannot be confined 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. Dove has published eleven volumes of poetry, a book of short stories (
Fifth Sunday, 1985), a collection of essays (''The Poet's World
, 1995), and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate
(1992). Her Collected Poems 1974–2004'' was released by
W. W. Norton in 2016; it carries an excerpt from
President Barack Obama's 2011
National Medal of Arts commendation on its back cover. at the "Furious Flower" gala in
Washington, D.C., September 27, 2019 In 1994, she published the play
The Darker Face of the Earth (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 Luck (first performance:
Boston Symphony,
Tanglewood, 1998, conducted by the composer). For "America's Millennium", the
White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Dove contributed — in a live reading at the
Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams' music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary
The Unfinished Journey. She also provided the texts for Pulitzer Prize winner
Tania Leon's musical works "Singin' Sepia" (1996), "Reflections" (2006) and "The Crossing Choir" (forthcoming), among other collaborations with multiple composers, most recently on "A Standing Witness" with
Richard Danielpour. Dove's most ambitious collection of poetry to date,
Sonata Mulattica, was published in 2009; it received the 2010
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Over its more than 200 pages, it "has the sweep and vivid characters of a novel", as
Mark Doty wrote in
O, The Oprah Magazine. Dove's 11th collection of poetry,
Playlist for the Apocalypse, was published by
W. W. Norton in August 2021.
The New York Times critic
Dwight Garner called it "among her best", "poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious." Dove edited
The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry, published in 2011. The collection provoked heated controversy as some critics complained that she valued an inclusive, populist agenda over quality. Poet
John Olson commented that "her exclusions are breathtaking". Well-known poets left out include
Sylvia Plath,
Allen Ginsberg,
Sterling Allen Brown,
Louis Zukofsky,
George Oppen,
Charles Reznikoff and
Lorine Niedecker. As Dove explained in her foreword and in media interviews, she had originally selected works by Plath, Ginsberg and Brown but these as well as some other poets were omitted against her editorial wishes; their contributions had to be removed from print-ready copy at the very last minute because their publisher forbade their inclusion due to a disagreement with
Penguin over permission fees. Critic
Helen Vendler condemned Dove's choices, asking "why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value?" Dove defended her editorial work vigorously in her response to Vendler in
The New York Review of Books, as well as in wide-ranging interviews with ''
The Writer's Chronicle, with poet Jericho Brown on the Best American Poetry website, and with Bill Moyers on his public television show Moyers & Company. The Boston Review'' continued the discussion from different angles with an aggressive attack by scholar
Marjorie Perloff and a spirited counter-attack by poet and scholar
Evie Shockley, who took on both Vendler and Perloff. Dove published a number of books in foreign translations, among them two into German, two into Chinese, three into Spanish, and one each into Norwegian, Macedonian, Italian, French, Dutch and Hebrew, plus numerous translations in foreign magazines. One of her earliest foreign translations was into French by
Paol Keineg and published in the Breton review "Bretagnes" in 1976. The annual "Rita Dove Poetry Award" was established by
Salem College Center for Women Writers in 2004. The documentary film
Rita Dove: An American Poet by
Eduardo Montes-Bradley premiered at the
Paramount Theater on January 31, 2014. In 2019, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth, Dove put the African-American poetic reception of Whitman into perspective at a poetry festival in Bogotá, Colombia, during a round-table session with
Robert Pinsky. ==Awards and honors==