In an insightful feature interview with UVA's student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, Rita Dove reflects on "the resonance of unrecorded stories" and "her approach to writing and teaching". To read the feature by Sophie Hay, click here.
Recent and Latest News
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On March 30, 2025, Rita Dove will give the 2025 Joshua Ringel Memorial Reading at the Baltimore Museum of Art Meyerhoff Auditorium. The reading begins at 2:30 pm and will be followed by a book signing.
The Joshua Ringel Memorial Fund honors CTY (Center for Talented Youth) alumnus and avid poetry lover Joshua Ringel and his parents, Mel and Barbara. The fund supports the arts in Baltimore by bringing a distinguished poet to the city each year for a free public poetry reading.
The event is free and open to the public. You can register and find more information here.
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Hailed for her “luscious, moody and dreamy” playing by the New York Times, pianist Lara Downes is equally celebrated as a musical innovator and cultural investigator. In this collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove, she presents a kaleidoscopic evening of music and poetry inspired by myriad stories of migration and transformation.
The performance will take place at 8 pm on Saturday, February 22 at the Reston Community Center in Reston, Virginia. For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.
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A major new and comprehensive interview with Rita Dove: https://www.literarymatters.org/17-2-the-unguarded-territory-of-thought-a-conversation-with-rita-dove/
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**Cancelled! Hopefully postponed to Fall 2025**A STANDING WITNESS, Rita Dove's monumental collaboration with composer Richard Danielpour that premiered with Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Susan Graham at Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center and the University of Chicago and was last performed at UVA a year ago, will have a reprise at the storied Ebell Hall in Los Angeles on March 9, again starring Ms. Graham.
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Eleven years after its premiere, Eduardo Montes-Bradley's documentary "Rita Dove - An American Poet" is now available free of charge on YouTube. It was first shown at The Paramount Theater in Charlottesville on January 31, 2014. It is 48 minutes long and contains a wealth of documentary material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mao8itrJafI
Also, there is a recording of the premiere events at the Paramount Theater that includes an homage to Rita Dove by former Dave Matthews Band violinist Boyd Tinsley and a conversation of Rita with novelist and former UVA Creative Writing director Christopher Tilghman, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbtjse9jS_4&t=2747s
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Pairing works by Johannes Brahms and the distinguished American composer Adolphus Hailstork (setting a text by former US poet laureate Rita Dove), this powerful concert celebrates the meaning and purpose of our time on earth, and pays tribute to the memory of Heather Heyer in what would have been her 40th birthday year. Heyer’s mother Susan Bro will address the audience, and honored guest Rita Dove will recite her poem from the stage. “The world called, and I answered.”
The concert will be held at 8 pm on Saturday, April 26, 2025 at Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage in Carnegie Hall. For more information or to purchase tickets, follow this link.
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An excellent interview with Rita Dove by Lois Reitzes on her WABE (Atlanta NPR) program "City Lights"! After accessing the website below, it can be listened to by first clicking on "Episode Playlist", then scrolling to Jan. 8, 2025 and clicking on the play button. https://www.wabe.org/podcasts/city-lights/
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First broadcast on Tuesday, January 21, 2025, UVA's own Rita Dove, Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing, was featured on the popular PBS program "Finding Your Roots" (in Season 11's Episode 3, Stranger Than Fiction). The one hour program, in which host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores the family trees of novelist Amy Tan and poet Rita Dove - traveling across China and the American South to uncover long lost stories of the ancestors who inspired their work - is now available on the Internet without a subscription or streaming service, free of charge and no sign-in requirements, until Feb. 19, 2025: https://www.pbs.org/video/stranger-than-fiction-pleuzj/ .
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Rita Dove met President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn several times over the years -- most notably in 1995 when she and Carter hosted Nobel Prize laureates in literature at The Carter Center in Atlanta for the Cultural Olympiad (a precursor event to the 1996 Olympics); and later that same year, they joined forces again to open the Dylan Thomas Center in Swansea, Wales, during a festive summer weekend where Rita Dove's daughter Aviva Dove-Viebahn, Ph.D. (UVA M.A. in art history 2003), then 12 years old, also had the honor of meeting the Carters.
All photos © by Fred Viebahn.
