The first black and youngest author to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, Rita Frances Dove considers herself the heir of Phillis Wheatley, slave poet of the colonial era. A complex intellectual, Dove has edited Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, and TriQuarterly and served at Harvard on the Afro-American Studies Visiting Committee while producing some of the twentieth century’s most controlled, viscerally satisfying imagery. She has earned praise for concrete immediacy. Her low-key, high intensity poems are distillations brewed by night until predawn from private imaginings and wordplay at her one-room cabin outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Her finished verse spirials out of everyday images and shards of sound, thought, and long-nurtured memory.
Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, on August 28, 1952. She discovered her gift for word manipulation in early childhood. Dove intended to make the most of her talents. After earning a National Merit Scholarship and ranking among the nation’s top 100 high school seniors in 1970, she accepted a Presidential Scholarship and a tour of the White House. Although she was a Phi Beta Kappa inductee and stellar graduate of Miami University, she disappointed her parents by taking creative writing workshops while pretending to study law. After a change of heart in her junior year, she also dismayed teachers by embracing poetry as a career goal. She completed her education on a Fulbright/Hays Scholarship at the University of Tübingen. While she was a teaching fellow at the Writer’s Workshop of the University of Iowa, she earned an M.F.A. in creative writing and issued a first volume, Ten Poems (1977).
In 1979, Dove married novelist Fred Viebahn, father of their daughter, Aviva Chantal, and translator of German editions of Dove’s verse. Blending political undercurrent into personal memoir, she began submitting to national poetry journals and published The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (1980) and a poetic slave memoir entitled The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). While teaching at the University of Arizona, she composed Museum (1983), a hymn to history and culture that moved toward a more mature expression beyond the limitations of personal experience. The height of this collection is “Parsley,” a depiction of Rafael Trujillo’s slaughter of 20,000 Caribbean blacks on the basis of their pronunciation of perejil, the Spanish word for parsley.
Dove reached literary maturity with a dramatic coup, Thomas and Beulah (1986), a forty-four-poem tribute to her Southern-born maternal grandparents. The work reads like a novel. Dove based the intimate glimpses on the stories of her grandmother Georgianna, who brightened widowhood by reliving romance and marriage in shared memories. The book won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first awarded to a black female since Gwendolyn Brooks’ prize in 1950.
Dove followed with The Other Side of the House (1988) and Grace Notes (1989); juxtaposed with short fiction in Fifth Sunday (1985); a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992); the one-act play The Siberian Village (1991); and a verse drama, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994). Among her honoraria are appointments as juror for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for poetry, the 1985 chair of poetry grants for the National Endowment for the Arts, and many honorary doctorates.
