Get Lit!

Spokane, Washington

April 15-23, 2005

	Rita Dove Presented by EWU Press Metropolitan Performing Arts Center April 17, 2005 7 p.m. [buy tickets] ^{Photo by © Fred Viebahn}

Rita Dove

Critically-acclaimed poet Rita Dove will read from her latest book of poems, American Smooth (September 2004) and talk about her life as the headlining poet of the 7^th Annual Inland Northwest Literary Arts "Get Lit!" Festival on April 17, 2005. Dove is one of several poets to appear on the Festival's opening Night of Poetry.

Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995, the youngest person and the first African-American to receive this highest official honor in American letters. In 1987, Dove received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and has been recognized with numerous literary and academic honors including the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal.

Born in Akron, Ohio in 1952, Dove's father was the first Black research chemist, who in the 1950s, broke the race barrier in the tire industry. In 1970, she was invited to the White House as a Presidential Scholar, one of the hundred most outstanding high school graduates in the United States that year, before attending Miami University in Ohio as a National Achievement Scholar. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi with a degree in English in 1973, followed by two semesters as a Fulbright scholar in Germany. She then joined the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977.

Appearances in magazines and anthologies had already won national acclaim for Rita Dove when she published her first poetry collection, The Yellow House on the Corner, in 1980. Her third book of poetry, Thomas and Beulah, a collection of interrelated poems loosely based on her grandparents' life, earned her the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, making her the second African American poet (after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950) to receive this prestigious award.

In addition to American Smooth (2004), The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) and Thomas and Beulah (1986), Dove has also published poetry collection Museum (1983), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995) and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). Other publications by Rita Dove include a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992) and a collection of her laureate lectures The Poet's World (1995). She edited the anthology Best American Poetry 2000, and from January 2000 to January 2002 she wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice," for the Washington Post.

Dove is also a playwright. Her verse drama, The Darker Face of the Earth, had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London and other theatres.

Dove, who taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989, now holds the chair as Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband. She has one grown daughter.

Salman Rushdie | Rita Dove | David Sedaris | Bob Edwards | Robert Bly