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.
