Rita Dove featured on "Finding Your Roots"

January 22, 2025

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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Essay on Playlist for the Apocalypse Featured in LA Review of Books

November 09, 2021

Writes Teow Lim Goh: "Rita Dove’s new poetry collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse, draws from the past and present, from the segregation of Jews in Venice’s Ghetto to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; from her relationship with her mother to her struggles with multiple sclerosis to quiet and private moments in which the speaker’s world shifts, whether suddenly or imperceptibly. These poems, in the range of histories and personalities that they invoke, resemble a playlist, a curated selection of songs from a variety of albums and artists, tracking different voices, moods, and themes. They are less about the end times than the cycles of tragedy and redemption that humans seem wired to repeat."

Click here to read the essay in full!
Interview with Rita Dove in Publishers Weekly

November 08, 2021

M: Your first collection appeared in 1980. Since then, you have produced ground-breaking work across genres. What do you feel has changed most in your poetic practice since you first began writing?

R: Poetic practice can also mean how the writing gets done. When I was a fledgling poet, I wrote to a world that didn’t know I existed, basically calling out: “Here I am! Is anyone there?” And with every response – a stranger writing a letter or attending a reading – I could feel the tribe growing larger, stronger. As I continued publishing, teaching, and giving readings and lectures, my audience grew. Now I’m fortunate to have an readership that appreciates my work, which is wonderful; but when I sit down to the blank page, I can’t assume to know who’s in that audience or anticipate what will move them. A poet addresses the void and hopes someone is listening; the poem is both a shout into the cosmos and a whisper into a stranger’s ear. I’ve been called a public poet, but for me the act of writing is a very intimate – nearly illicit – undertaking; to be aware of all those incognito readers, waiting, while trying to coax a poem into being is to become self-conscious in the worst way – inspiration either flies right out the window or chokes on its own sputters.

Which brings us to changes in my physical poetic practice over the years. When I was young with a myriad possibilities before me, I could write anywhere – in a coffee shop or on a park bench, at a card table with a 12-inch TV blaring from the corner of the room. But the world’s racket seems more dissonant now, and I yearn for quiet. I try to carve out as large a chunk of uninterrupted time as I can finagle and retreat into a near-monastic seclusion, far away from the clamoring voices, until I can finally hear the whispers at my core. Poetic practice becomes a physical escape – shut the door, turn off radio and phone, block the internet – to a desert island of the mind where the cacophony of opinions and expectations has fallen away.

I began as many young writers do – reading voraciously, emulating favorite poets, searching for my “voice” – as if voice were a static quality. Everything I’ve experienced and lived through has somehow affected my writing, even my passionate pursuit of decidedly non-poetic hobbies like ballroom dancing and sewing: I pay more attention to syllabic dips and swirls; I relish stitching the parts of a narrative into a three-dimensional garment that can pirouette in the center of a lyric moment. Collaborating across genres – with composers, visual artists, architects, dancers – has enriched my poetic intonation and pacing. But I would say that being a practicing musician has been the greatest game changer. I started playing cello in fourth grade, around the same time I began writing poems and science fiction stories. And it’s fair to say that the poems in my earlier books were written by a cellist; I liked working those lower registers. But when my professional life began to speed up and my schedule grew too busy to accommodate dragging a cello along on book tours, I took up classical singing, reasoning that at least now I could carry the music with me, inside me. I discovered that I was a soprano, which meant if I wanted to make music, I had to lead the choir; so I learned to relax in that thin upper air and float without looking down. Over time, some of that chutzpah has rubbed off on my poetry. Quite a few poems in my latest book could have been sung by a dramatic soprano; there’s a conscious vocal projection, conveying the melodic line.

Click here to read the rest of the Q&A!
Rita Dove's "Voiceover" Featured in Poetry Daily

October 28, 2021

Click here to read the poem! (Originally featured October 27, 2021)
Rita Dove in Conversation with Michael Silverblatt of KCRW's "Bookworm" Podcast

October 26, 2021

The US Poet Laureate from ’93 to ’95, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, honored with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts—readers, it’s been too long since Rita Dove has blessed us with her writing. She speaks about relearning how to write after her multiple sclerosis diagnosis. And her experiences with racism as a Black woman wherever she goes. She says “Playlist for the Apocalypse” echoes what’s going on in the world, from many different historical and personal directions, while meaning to comfort the reader.

Click here to listen to the episode!
Playlist for the Apocalypse Named One of the Top 5 Poetry Collections of 2021 by Publishers Weekly

October 22, 2021

In Dove’s commanding first collection of new poems since her 2017 NAACP Image Award–winning Collected Poems: 1974–2004, she offers an unforgettable exploration of contemporary crises while still finding beauty and cause for hope. Her ruminations on illness, climate change, and political upheaval deliver sharp perspectives on life’s difficulties and wrongs big and small, while encouraging readers to see current possibilities for effecting future change.
Rita Dove's "Incantation of the First Order" Featured in Poem-a-Day

October 19, 2021

Click to read and/or listen to the poem! (Originally featured October 18, 2021)
UVA Today: "NASA Spacecraft Heads for the Jupiter Trojan Asteroids, with Rita Dove's Poetry Aboard"

October 14, 2021

An unmanned NASA spacecraft named Lucy is making the first space mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, small bodies that share an orbit with the fifth planet from the sun. Lucy’s payload includes a plaque imprinted with words of wisdom for future explorers to find – including poetry from University of Virginia professor Rita Dove.

The spacecraft – more than 52 feet tip to tip, with its two circular solar arrays unfurled, each close to 24 feet in diameter – is scheduled to launch between Saturday and Nov. 7. It will embark on a 12-year journey to study some of the asteroids in “the swarms of Trojan asteroids associated with [but not actually near] Jupiter,” according to NASA’s Lucy website. “These primitive bodies hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system.”

Click here to read the rest of the article!
Rita Dove in Conversation with Jordan Kisner on Literary Hub's "Thresholds" Podcast

October 13, 2021

In this episode, Jordan Kisner talks to Rita Dove, author most recently of Playlist for the Apocalypse, about discovery, taking a break from creating and publishing, and re-learning to hold a pencil again after her MS diagnosis.

Listen now!
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!