BCR Leading Ladies: Rita Dove, First Black Poet Laureate of the United States
RITA DOVE became the first black US poet laureate, and the youngest to boot, in 1993, and served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995. She was also the second African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, awarded in 1987. (The first was Gwendolyn Brooks, who won in 1950.)
Dove was born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989. Dove is a former Fulbright scholar and also won Guggenheim and Mellon fellowships. She has won numerous awards and honors, among them 16 honorary doctorates, the NAACP Great American Artist Award, and Glamour’s Woman of the Year. Award.
Dove is best known for the Pulitzer-winning poetry collection Thomas and Beulah. However, she has published nearly a dozen books of poetry and other works. Dove now teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, where she has been a professor since 1989.
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