Rita Dove

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

Life

Rita Dove acquired in 1973 with a degree in English ( Creative Writing ) at the Miami University of Ohio and then spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Tübingen. Your master's degree (MFA - Master of Fine Arts ) she made in 1977 at the University of Iowa. From 1977 to 1981, she traveled extensively and spent considerable 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 teaches writing poetry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she holds the chair as Commonwealth Professor of English since 1993. Since 1979 she has been married to the German writer Fred Viehbahn; They have a grown daughter.

In 1987, Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for her poem cycle Thomas and Beulah ( Carnegie Mellon University Press: 1986 ), for which she was inspired by the life story of her grandparents. This had left like many other black Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, the southern states and wanted in more northern industrial centers for work. In this, as in other works Dove is the seemingly insignificant moments that make up the lives of her characters, in relation to historical and political developments and tries to make the concrete reality of life of ordinary people, which often remains invisible in conventional history, tangible.

From 1993 to 1995 Rita Dove was Poet Laureate of the United States. She was the youngest person of this honor had come up by this time. In this role, Dove tried to convey above all, that poetry is not reserved for an elite, but have space in everyday life and a broad mass of people should be accessible. In this context, she stepped eg also on Sesame Street to get children interested in poetry and literature.

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 ( 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 )

• The Oriental dancer ( Poems, Random House ) ( 1988)
• The glass front of the present ( poems, Heiderhoff Verlag) (1989 )
• The darker face of the earth ( play ) (2002 ) (online version, PDF, 382 kB)

Full Biography

Rita Dove is the most popular contemporary poet in the USA. For this purpose, has its contributed 1987 awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the highest official literary honor of the United States, the Poet Laureate position at the Library of Congress, which she held from 1993 to 1995, especially the attention next to the who give you many years the mass media. She portrayed the television journalist Bill Moyers in a dedicated to her one-hour movie in prime time in PBS ( Public Broadcasting System), it is repeated in the most popular radio program between the Atlantic and Pacific occurred, Garrison Keillor's weekly live show, " A Prairie Home Companion ", and American children parents and they always get back to " Sesame Street" to face, as she explains Big Bird lyrics. Her poems hang both in the subways of New York and Chicago as well, by means of a poster of the American Library Association, in numerous libraries and schools.

Rita Dove was born in the known mainly as the center of the tire manufacturing industry city Akron, Ohio; her father was the first black chemist who managed to break through the racial barriers in the tire industry. In 1970 she was appointed as one of the hundred best American high school graduates of the year for "Presidential Scholar " and invited to the White House, where Richard Nixon refused however to give her and her Mitgeehrten the hand, as they him to a resolution of protest against wanted to hand over the Vietnam War.

She studied English and German at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1973 and made her Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude. This was followed by two semesters as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Tübingen, before she accepted an assistant position at the cradle of creative writing programs of American universities, the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she graduated with a Master ( Master of Fine Arts ) in 1977. A year earlier, in 1976, she had the German writer Fred Viehbahn met, who spent a semester as a guest of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After graduating, she lived with Viehbahn in Oberlin, Ohio, while he taught for two years in the German department of Oberlin College. They married there in the spring of 1979, then spent five years in Israel and then, after a long Südeuropareise, 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 with her husband back to the United States. The daughter Aviva was born in 1983 in Phoenix, Arizona. Publications in journals and anthologies had already drawn some attention to the young African-American poet, as Carnegie - Mellon University Press 1980 her first book of poetry published, The Yellow House on the Corner. This was followed by Museum ( 1983) and Thomas and Beulah (1986 ), both also from Carnegie Mellon. For Thomas and Beulah, a sequence of inter-related content, from the life of her maternal grandparents inspired poems, Rita Dove received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize. Thomas and Beulah in 1989 produced as a one-hour TV movie and aired repeatedly on PBS.

On the Pulitzer Prize followed the poetry collections Grace Notes (1989 ), Mother Love (1995 ), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth ( 2004) and " Sonata Mulattica " (2009 ), all from the publisher WW Norton (New York & London). 1993 Random House published the anthology Selected Poems, which summarizes the first three volumes ( The Yellow House on the Corner, Museum and Thomas and Beulah ). Two German selection volumes from these early books are also published: 1988 The Oriental dancer with Rowohlt in the translation by Karin Graf, and 1989 The glass front of the presence in Heiderhoff Verlag, translated by Fred Viehbahn.

Also, are by Rita Dove, a collection 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 a band with their library of Congress lectures, the Poet's World (Library of Congress, 1995) before. In 1994, her poem "Lady Freedom Among Us ," which she had first read the two hundredth anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol, one of the earliest literary publications on the Internet, and in a multimedia version of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she in 1989 by Arizona had moved and where it holds 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 of the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, learned its premiere in summer 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon and was in the fall of jointly emulated and the Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, New jersey, and at the Kennedy Center in 1997. The European premiere took place in the summer of 1999 at the Royal National Theatre in London.

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

Rita Dove and her work have experienced numerous awards - so in addition to scholarships and prizes, twenty-two honorary doctorates. Among the honors in recent years are the John Heinz Prize ( 1996), at the time the most lucrative award for American artists, who assigned by the U.S. president, " National Humanities Medal " ( also 1996), the books lion medal from the New York Public Library ( 2000), "Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award " (2001), the " Commonwealth Award" (2006), the "Lifetime Achievement Award " (2008) library of Virginia ( State Library of Virginia in Richmond ), the "Lifetime Achievement " medal of the Fulbright Association ( 2009) and the" National Medal of Arts 2011 " by President Barack Obama.

1995 Rita Dove was shared with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and under the auspices of the Olympic Committee hosted a unique gathering of Literaturnobelpreisträgern in Atlanta, Georgia. The following year, for the Olympic Games in Atlanta itself, she wrote the narration for symphonic work Umoja - Each One of Us Counts of composer Alvin Singleton, that with the civil rights activists and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Andrew Young as the opening weekend of the Olympics in Atlanta speaker was premiered.

More poems and texts were, inter alia, set to music by the composer Tania Leon (premiered at Merkin Concert Hall, New York, 1996), and Bruce Adolphe ( premiered at Lincoln Center, New York, 1997). The song cycle Seven for Luck, with music of the multiple Academy Award winner John Williams, was premiered on 25 July 1998 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Massachusetts, broadcast on National Public Radio. She also worked with John Williams and Steven Spielberg on the documentary The Unfinished Journey, which was sent in the New Year's Eve 1999/2000 as part of the big event "American Millennium " by the White House on NBC and the Rita Dove live just before midnight their Text the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington recited.

Rita Dove is a former president of the Associated Writing Programs ( the union of the creative writing programs at American universities ). She sits on the advisory boards of numerous journals ( Callaloo, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Mid- American Review, TriQuarterly, and others) and organizations ( inter alia, Thomas Jefferson Center for Freedom of Expression ). She belongs to, inter alia, the PEN American Center, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the very exclusive American Academy of Arts and Letters. For six years (1994-2000) she was Senator ( Board Member) of Phi Beta Kappa, the Association of American academic elite; 2006-2012 she was Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets ( Academy of American Poets ).