The Board of Trustees of the Kenyon Review was pleased to honor Rita Dove as the 2018 recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and poet laureate of the United States from 1993-1995, Dove is the only poet to have received both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Her work transforms the past into our present with power, originality, and grace.
About Rita Dove
Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. She received her BA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and then studied in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa. In 1980 she published her first poetry collection, The Yellow House on the Corner, and a year later began teaching creative writing at Arizona State University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1987 for her collection Thomas and Beulah. She was named United States Poet Laureate in 1993, becoming the first African-American person to hold the position. At age forty, she was also the youngest poet to receive the appointment. Among numerous honors and awards, she has received a Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, a Common Wealth Award for Literature, and a National Humanities Medal.
Her other poetry collections are Museum (1983), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999, New York Times Notable Selection, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), American Smooth (2004, New York Times Notable Selection), and Sonata Mulattica (2009, winner of Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, currently being produced as a documentary by Spark Media). In addition to poetry, Dove has written several works of prose, including the essay collection The Poet’s World (1995), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), and the short story collection Fifth Sunday (1985). Her play The Darker Face of the Earth (1994) premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was later staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and the Royal National Theatre in London. She edited The Best American Poetry 2000 and The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry (2011).
Dove is currently Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia and poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine. Her Collected Poems: 1974-2004 (2016, NAACP Image Award in Poetry) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Charlottesville with her husband, the novelist Fred Viebahn, and competes in ballroom dance.