Rita Dove

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Rita Dove (2017)

Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952 in Akron , Ohio ) is an American poet and writer .

Life

Rita Dove graduated from Miami University of Ohio with a degree in English ( creative writing ) in 1973 and then spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Tübingen . She completed her master's degree (MFA - Master of Fine Arts) in 1977 from the University of Iowa . From 1977 to 1981 she traveled extensively and spent long periods of time as a freelance writer in Oberlin (Ohio), Dun Laoghaire (Ireland), West Berlin and Jerusalem (Israel). From 1981 to 1989, Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University . Since 1989 she has taught poetry writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she has been the Commonwealth Professor of English since 1993. She has been married to the German writer Fred Viebahn since 1979 ; they have a grown daughter.

In 1987 Dove received the Pulitzer Prize for her cycle of poems, Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon University Press: 1986), for which she was inspired by the life stories of her grandparents. Like many other black Americans, they had left the southern states in the first half of the twentieth century and looked for work in industrial centers further north. In this, as in other works, Dove relates the seemingly unimportant moments that make up the lives of their characters to historical and political developments and tries to make tangible the concrete reality of ordinary people's lives, which often remains invisible in conventional history books.

From 1993 to 1995 Rita Dove was the United States Poet Laureate . She was the youngest person to have received this honor to date. In this role, Dove tried above all to convey that poetry is not reserved for an elite, but should have a place in everyday life and should be accessible to a broad mass of people. In this context, she entered z. B. also on Sesame Street to get children excited about poetry and literature.

Dove was included in the Daughters of Africa anthology published in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York. Her Collected Poems: 1974 - 2004 received the 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category.

Works

  • The Yellow House on the Corner (Poems) (1980)
  • Museum (Poems) (1983)
  • Fifth Sunday (short stories) (1985)
  • Thomas and Beulah (Poems) [ The Oriental Dancer ] (1986)
  • Grace Notes (Poems) (1989)
  • Through the Ivory Gate (novel) (1992)
  • Selected Poems (1993)
  • The Darker Face of Earth (verse drama) (1994)
  • Mother Love (Poems) (1995)
  • The Poet's World (Lectures and Essays) (1995)
  • On the Bus with Rosa Parks (Poems) (1999)
  • American Smooth (poems) (2004)
  • Sonata Mulattica (Poems) (2009)
  • The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (sole editor) (2011)
  • Collected Poems 1974-2004 (poems) (2016)
in German
  • The Oriental Dancer (Poems, Rowohlt Verlag) (1988)
  • The glass forehead of the present (poems, Heiderhoff Verlag) (1989)
  • The darker face of the earth (play) (2002) ( online version ; PDF; 382 kB)

Detailed biography

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Rita Dove is one of the most famous contemporary poets in the USA. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize awarded to her in 1987 and the highest official literary honor in the United States, the poet laureate position at the Library of Congress , which she held from 1993 to 1995, above all the attention she has received since the mid-1980s the mass media give. The television journalist Bill Moyers portrayed her in a one-hour film dedicated to her in prime time on the PBS (Public Broadcasting System), she appeared repeatedly on the most popular radio program between the Atlantic and Pacific, Garrison Keillor's weekly live show "A Prairie Home Companion", and American ones For decades, children and parents saw her on Sesame Street, where she explained Big Bird poetry. Her poems have been posted on the New York and Chicago subways as well as, through a poster by the American Library Association, in numerous libraries and schools.

Rita Dove was born in the industrial city of Akron, Ohio, which is primarily known as the center of tire production; her father was the first black chemist to break the racial barriers in the tire industry. In 1970 she was named one of the top hundred American high school graduates of the year to the "Presidential Scholar" and invited to the White House , where Richard Nixon refused to shake hands with her and her fellow students, as she gave him a resolution to protest against the Wanted to hand over the Vietnam War.

She studied English and German at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in 1973 . This was followed by two semesters as a Fulbright scholarship holder at the University of Tübingen before she accepted an assistant position at the cradle of creative writing programs at American universities, the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she graduated in 1977 with a Master of Fine Arts. A year earlier, in 1976, she had met the German author Fred Viebahn, who had spent a semester as a guest of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After graduation, she lived with Viebahn in Oberlin, Ohio while he taught in the German department of Oberlin College for two years. They married there in the spring of 1979, then lived for six months in Israel and then, after an extensive trip to southern Europe, for a year in West Berlin. In the summer of 1981 Rita Dove accepted an assistant professorship in creative writing at Arizona State University and moved back to the United States with her husband. The daughter Aviva was born in 1983 in Phoenix, Arizona. Magazine and anthology publications had already drawn some attention to the young African-American poet when Carnegie-Mellon University Press published her first volume of poetry, The Yellow House on the Corner, in 1980 . This was followed by Museum (1983) and Thomas and Beulah (1986), both also by Carnegie-Mellon. Rita Dove received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah , a sequence of linked poems inspired by the life of her maternal grandparents. Thomas and Beulah was also produced as a one-hour television film in 1989 and repeatedly broadcast on PBS.

The Pulitzer Prize was followed by the volumes of poetry Grace Notes (1989), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004) and "Sonata Mulattica" (2009), all from WW Norton (New York) & London). In 1993 Random House published the anthology Selected Poems , which brings together the first three volumes ( The Yellow House on the Corner , Museum and Thomas and Beulah ). Two German selected volumes from these early books have also been published: 1988 The Oriental Dancer by Rowohlt in the translation by Karin Graf, and 1989 The Glass Forehead of the Present by Heiderhoff Verlag, translated by Fred Viebahn. In 2016 WW Norton, Doves Verlag since 1989, published Collected Poems 1974-2004 .

Rita Dove also has a volume of short stories ( Fifth Sunday , Callaloo Fiction Series, 1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), the play The Darker Face of the Earth (Story Line Press, 1994; revised stage versions 1996 and 2000) and presented a volume of her Congress Library Lectures, The Poet's World (Library of Congress, 1995). In 1994 her poem "Lady Freedom Among Us", which she first read on the bicentenary of the US Capitol's groundbreaking, became one of the earliest literary publications on the Internet in a multimedia version from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, which she sent from in 1989 Arizona and where she has held a Chair as Commonwealth Professor of English since 1993. The play The Darker Face of the Earth , for which she received the 1995 Fund for New American Plays Award from the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, premiered in the summer of 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon and was released in the fall 1997 jointly staged at the Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and at the Kennedy Center. The European premiere took place in the summer of 1999 at the Royal National Theater in London.

In October 2011, Rita Dove published The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry ; it was the first time in American literary history that a major publishing house gave a non-white editor (or publisher) sole responsibility for such a general compilation.

Rita Dove and her work have received numerous awards - in addition to scholarships and prizes, twenty-eight honorary doctorates (including 2014 from Yale University and 2018 from Harvard University). Her honors include the Heinz Award (1996), at the time the most valuable award for American artists, the National Humanities Medal awarded by the US President (also 1996), the New York Public Library's Lion Medal (2000), the “ Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award "(2001), the" Common Wealth Award "(2006), the" Lifetime Achievement Award "(2008) from the Library of Virginia (State Library of Virginia in Richmond), the" Lifetime Achievement "medal from Fulbright Association (2009) and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.

In 1995, Rita Dove hosted a unique gathering of Nobel Prize winners for literature in Atlanta, Georgia with former US President Jimmy Carter and under the auspices of the Olympic Committee. The following year, for the Atlanta Olympics itself, she wrote the speaking text for the symphonic work Umoja - Each One of Us Counts by composer Alvin Singleton, which was performed on the opening weekend of the Atlanta Olympics with civil rights activist and former American UN ambassador Andrew Young as Speaker was premiered.

Other poems and texts were u. a. Set to music by the composers Tania Leon (first performed at Merkin Concert Hall, New York, 1996) and Bruce Adolphe (first performed at Lincoln Center, New York, 1997). The song cycle Seven for Luck , with music by multiple Academy Award winner John Williams, premiered on July 25, 1998 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the composer's direction at the Tanglewood Music Festival, and was broadcast on National Public Radio. She also worked with John Williams and Steven Spielberg on the documentary The Unfinished Journey , which was broadcast on New Year's Eve 1999/2000 as part of the American Millennium of the White House on NBC and to which Rita Dove wrote her text live just before midnight lectured on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

Rita Dove is the past president of the Associated Writing Programs (the union of creative writing programs at American universities). She sits on the advisory boards of numerous journals (Callaloo, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Plowshares, Mid-American Review, TriQuarterly and others) and organizations (including the Thomas Jefferson Center for Freedom of Expression). She belongs u. a. the PEN American Center, the American Philosophical Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters . For six years (1994-2000) she was a senator (board member) of Phi Beta Kappa , the association of the American academic elite; from 2005 to 2011 she was a chancellor of the American Academy of American Poets.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Dove, Rita
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dove, Rita Frances (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Akron