News

Rita Dove and Lara Downes to perform “Tomorrow I May Be Far Away”

February 20, 2025

Rita Dove interview in Literary Matters Magazine

February 14, 2025

Rita Dove documentary now available free of charge

February 05, 2025

Rita Dove on "City Lights with Lois Reitzes"

January 24, 2025

Rita Dove featured on "Finding Your Roots"

January 22, 2025

Contact

University of Virginia
Creative Writing Program
rfd4b@virginia.edu

UVA Faculty Profile

Filter News By Year

Recent and Latest News

University of Chicago Presents: Music from Copland House and Susan Graham – A Standing Witness

October 07, 2021

Pierre Jalbert: Crossings
John Harbison: Songs America Loves to Sing
Richard Danielpour: A Standing Witness

October 8, 2021 | 7:30PM

Mandel Hall

Music From Copland House’s adventurous and exhilarating concerts link America’s composers to their musical and cultural ancestry and to the wider worlds of literature, theater, painting, history, nature, and science. At UChicago Presents, the acclaimed resident ensemble from Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home and mezzo-soprano Susan Graham explore what it is to be American with the world premiere of A Standing Witness by Richard Danielpour on poetry by former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove.

For more information, including to purchase tickets, visit this link.
Rita Dove's "Postlude" Featured in The New York Times Magazine

October 05, 2021

(illustration by R. O. Blechman}

Click here to read the poem!
Rita Dove on WNYC's All Of It with Alison Stewart

October 04, 2021

Listen now!
Rita Dove on PBS NewsHour!

September 16, 2021
Rita Dove with Jericho Brown | A Rain Taxi Event -- Video Available

September 09, 2021

In her first book of new poems in twelve years, acclaimed poet Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Deftly connecting history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives—a trademark of the writer the Boston Globe has called “perhaps the best public poet we have”—and alternating poignant meditations on mortality with acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.

This event originally took place August 3, 2021; it can be watched on the Rain Taxi Review of Books YouTube page.
Interviews with Rita Dove!

September 01, 2021
(image credit: Rebecca Clarke)

Click below to read them now!

"By the Book," The New York Times (August 6, 2021)

Interview with Chet'la Sebree, Guernica (August 11, 2021)

Interview with Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch (August 15, 2021)
Playlist for the Apocalypse -- Out Now!

August 17, 2021
Playlist for the Apocalypse drops tomorrow...

August 16, 2021

...and the reviews are in!

From Meredith Boe of Chicago Review of Books: "[Dove's] poems magnify the marginalized individual, simultaneously illuminating national and global failed attempts at democracy. As always, her words are raw, poignant, and accessible."

From Dwight Garner of The New York Times: "'Playlist for the Apocalypse,' Rita Dove’s new book of poems, is among her best. [...] You sense the books of many poets of Dove’s generation slipping to the back of the bookcase. Not hers."

From Publishers Weekly: "Dove brilliantly breathes new life into the present age, revealing it as a time for urgent change."
Forthcoming in August: Playlist for the Apocalypse

May 21, 2021

A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe).

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives—the simmering resentment of an elevator operator, an octogenarian’s exuberant mambo, the mordant humor of a philosophizing cricket.

Audaciously playful yet grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.

For more information, including pre-ordering Playlist for the Apocalypse, visit W. W. Norton's website.

**MORE**

Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing