Rita Dove to join the Irish Arts Center's 16th Annual PoetryFest

July 22, 2025

Rita Dove will be joining the Irish Arts Center in New York City this fall for their 16th Annual PoetryFest! Tickets can be reserved as of July 22. Learn more about her partnering with Paul Muldoon on December 7 (twice!) as well as the other events, here: https://irishartscenter.org/event/16th-annual-poetryfest

Contact

University of Virginia
Creative Writing Program
rfd4b@virginia.edu

UVA Faculty Profile

Filter News By Year

Recent and Latest News

Rita Dove in Conversation with Amanda Gorman for Authors Guild Foundation Gala

May 10, 2022

The 30th Annual Authors Guild Foundation Gala honored Amanda Gorman with the AGF Award for Literature with Social Impact on May 9, 2022. As part of the celebration, Rita Dove and Amanda Gorman conversed about the legacy and impact of poetry today.

For the full Gala video, please visit this link!
Rita Dove and "Thomas and Beulah" Featured on Talk of Iowa

April 22, 2022
To listen to the episode, visit this link!

Published in 1986, Thomas and Beulah is a poetry collection, that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, inspired by the lives of Rita Dove's grandparents.

Dove grew up in Ohio but spent time in Iowa earning her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1977. She has since become one of the most celebrated poets in American History. Dove was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 1993 and was the first Black American to fill that role. She has received the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her most recent work is Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems, released in 2021. Dove joins host Charity Nebbe for this Talk of Iowa Book Club conversation to reflect on her work.

Later in the podcast, expert readers Debra Marquart and Tracie Morris join the conversation. Marquart is Iowa’s Poet Laureate. She is an author, poet, musician and a distinguished professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. Marquart's most recent book is The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging. Morris is the writer and editor of several books, a poet and performer. She is a professor of poetry at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her most recent book is Who Do with Words: A Blerd Love Tone Manifesto. Marquart and Morris delve into Dove's collection to talk about form, structure and themes.

Interested in joining the next meeting of the Talk of Iowa Book Club? The 2022 Book Club reading list is now available and our June selection is A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Join the discussion June 14, 2022. You can also chat about book club selections and other literary interests with Charity and hundreds of other readers in the Talk of Iowa Book Club Facebook Group.

Guests:

Rita Dove, American poet, writer, former U.S. Poet Laureate 1993 -1995

Tracie Morris, professor of poetry, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University of Iowa

Debra Marquart, Iowa Poet Laureate, author, poet, musician, distinguished professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa State University
Rita Dove Commemorated as a "Change Agent" by The University of Virginia

April 18, 2022

[Portrait credit: Sanjay Suchak. Photo credit: Dan Addison]

Poet Rita Dove and the location known as “the Black Bus Stop” are the latest subjects of the University of Virginia’s recent initiative to commemorate important people, places and events that have helped shape UVA over the past approximately 50 years.

A portrait of Dove, currently Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing and a faculty member for more than 30 years, graces the front room of Pavilion VII and can be glimpsed looking through the window.

For more information, please visit this link.
Rita Dove in conversation with Victoria Chang at Virginia Festival for the Book

March 29, 2022

In partnership with the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and as the closing event for the 2022 Virginia Festival of the Book, the Virginia Festival for the Book presented poets Victoria Chang (Obit) and Rita Dove (Playlist for the Apocalypse) on March 20, reading from and discussing their recent collections. Chang received the 2021 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Obit, and Dove is a long-time juror for the AWBA, which was established in 1935 and is the only juried American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity. In conversation with Karen Long.
Rita Dove Nominated for LA Book Prize for Poetry

February 23, 2022

The finalists for the 42nd Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced this morning. Winners will be announced at USC’s Bovard Auditorium on April 22, the day before the 27th Los Angeles Times Festival of Books kicks off its first in-person event since the beginning of the pandemic. Winners in the special categories will also be celebrated that day.

Click here to see the full list of nominees!
Playlist for the Apocalypse among Orion Magazine's 12 Poetry Recommendations for Black History Month

February 23, 2022

"Camille Dungy and poet friends are back with another list of stellar recommended reading. From new titles to seminal classics, you’ll want to check out these environmentally-engaged poetry collections by Black poets today, and every day."

Click here to see the full list!
Rita Dove Featured Guest in "Break Out" Poetry Event

February 15, 2022

This past Saturday, February 12, about half a million people attended Rita Dove's virtual appearance and conversation with Chinese translator Cheng Jia at the 2022 "International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong" via the festival's streaming service. A recording is now available via YouTube:

About the festival: Break Out: IPNHK Reading & Dialogue Series is an online extension of International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (IPNHK), a biennial program organized by the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation until November 2019. Created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic that brought social distancing and isolation to our lives everywhere, Break Out presents distinguished poets from around the world and their translators in conversation. Poets, translators, and sometimes scholars read poetry in different languages and discuss topics of common interest. Livestreamed in seven sessions from May to August in 2021, the first season of Break Out featured 12 international poets, drawing over 3.3 million viewers in the process.
Rita Dove Among "40 Black Writers Whose Work Changed The World"

February 08, 2022

In honor of Black History Month, Buzzfeed has posted a list of 40 Black writers, including Rita Dove, "whose work has been a cultural game-changer in the United States and throughout the world." Click here for the full list!
Rita Dove in conversation with Glory Edim and Salamishah Tillet

February 08, 2022

Rita Dove's conversation with Glory Edim and Salamishah Tillet, first streamed live by the New York Public Library on Feb. 3, 2022, is now available on YouTube:
Rita Dove Nominated for NAACP Image Award

January 18, 2022

Earlier today, Playlist for the Apocalypse was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work -- Poetry! Click here for the full list.
Rita Dove a Featured Guest on "Inside UVA" Podcast

January 11, 2022

University of Virginia President Jim Ryan welcomed Rita Dove this week as the tenth guest on his “Inside UVA” podcast. Click here to read more about it and to listen to the episode!
Rita Dove Among the New York Times' "Top Books of 2021"

December 16, 2021

On Playlist for the Apocalypse: Rita Dove’s new collection is about the weight of American history, and it’s also about mortality. It’s the first time she has publicly acknowledged that she has had a form of multiple sclerosis for more than 20 years. Some of these poems address health troubles. Some are about Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama. Garner called the poems “among her best,” and wrote: “Dove’s books derive their force from how she so deftly stirs the everyday — insomnia, TV movies, Stilton cheese, rattling containers of pills — into her world of ideas and intellection, in poems that are by turns delicate, witty and audacious.”

Click here to see the full list!
Rita Dove Among 2021 Portland Book Festival Highlights

December 10, 2021

This episode of “Literary Arts: The Archive Project,” features highlights from the 2021 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America. Listen to excerpts from longer discussions between novelist Brandon Taylor and Genevieve Hudson, cartoonist Aminder Dhaliwal and OPB’s Tiffany Camhi, and legendary poet Rita Dove and Mary Szybist.

Click here to listen!
Rita Dove Among Distinguished Alumni at Fulbright 75 Event

December 08, 2021

Rita Dove with Sam Nester (l) and Renée Fleming (r). Photo © Katie Dance.

The Fulbright Program, celebrating its 75^th anniversary throughout 2021, held a spectacular event on November 30 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Alumni, friends, and supporters of the Fulbright Program joined us virtually to celebrate the accomplishments of the past 75 years and to look ahead to the exciting future of the U.S. government’s flagship program of educational and cultural exchange.

The event included personal stories and performances by some of our most extraordinary alumni, including recent participants and those who have had long and distinguished careers. The celebration highlighted the Fulbright Program’s impact in five important areas: the environment; education; public service; science, technology, and public health; and the arts.

Click here for more information on the gala, including photos!
Rita Dove and Susan Graham Discuss "A Standing Witness" on Vermont Public Radio

December 07, 2021

On a cold October night, Middlebury's Mahaney Arts Center hosted the New England premiere of a new work by Richard Danielpour.

Delayed by over a year due to the pandemic, the work, "A Standing Witness" is the result of a collaboration between Danielpour and Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. Poet Laureate, Rita Dove. It was commissioned by Music from Copland House in Peekskill, New York.

The work, a monumental 60-minute long song cycle for mezzo-soprano and chamber ensemble, connects and interweaves pivotal events from the last 50 years of American history, often highlighting the old adage, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Click here to listen to the full interview!
Playlist for the Apocalypse Named One of NPR’s "Best Books of 2021"

November 30, 2021

Click here to see the full list!
Playlist for the Apocalypse Cited as One of 100 Notable Books by The New York Times Book Review

November 22, 2021

Click here to see the full list!
Recent happenings!

November 16, 2021

Check out these media highlights!

The New York Times Book Review featured Playlist for the Apocalypse in its recent piece, "Five Poets Who Find Music in the Personal, the Political or in Music Itself"

OregonArtsWatch reviewed the Portland Book Festival event featuring Rita Dove, Qian Julie Wang, and Lauren Groff

And Rita Dove's Portland Book Festival conversation with Mary Szybist was excerpted as one of the Festival highlights in the radio show/podcast The Archive Project
Rita Dove in Conversation with Mary Szybist at the Portland Book Festival

November 11, 2021

Click here to access the video! (Originally aired November 10, 2021)
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!
Rita Dove on WNYC's All Of It with Alison Stewart

October 04, 2021

Listen now!

**MORE**

Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing

Rita Dove to join the Irish Arts Center's 16th Annual PoetryFest

Rita Dove with Sam Nester (l) and Renée Fleming (r). Photo © Katie Dance.