Rita Dove Wins Library of Virginia Award!

October 17, 2022

Rita Dove, Carolyn Eastman and Jocelyn Nicole Johnson were the top winners at the 25th Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards on Saturday.

Best-selling author Adriana Trigiani hosted the celebration, with Virginia author and culinary historian Michael W. Twitty as the featured speaker.

The Pulitzer prize-winning poet and former poet laureate Rita Dove won the poetry award for her book "Playlist for the Apocalypse," her first volume of new poems in 12 years. Dove is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

For more information about the Awards ceremony, including the full list of winners, please visit this link!

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Recent and Latest News

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!

Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing

Rita Dove Wins Library of Virginia Award!

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