LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Rita Dove

Rita Dove (1952- ), American poet, short-story writer and novelist, is known for her careful control of language and for works that manage to be both objective and personal, addressing social issues from a number of differing perspectives. Many of Dove's poems reflect her immense love of history as well as her interest in mythology and her knowledge of the Bible. Literary critic Arnold Rampersad described her as 'surely one of the three or four most gifted young Black American poets to appear since LeRoi Jones [. . .] and perhaps the most disciplined and technically accomplished Black poet to arrive since Gwendolyn Brooks' (Callaloo, 26; Winter 1986).

Genre: Domestic fiction; Poetry

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By Rita Dove

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American Smooth - Poems by Rita Dove
Rita Dove's magnificent poems pay homage to our kaleidoscopic cultural heritage; from the glorious shimmer of an operatic soprano to Bessie Smith's mournful wail; from paradise lost to angel food cake; from hotshots at the local shooting range to the Negro jazz band in World War I whose music conquered Europe before the Allied advance. Like the ballroom-dancing couple of the title poem, smiling and making the difficult seem effortless, Dove explores the shifting surfaces between perception and intimation.
Mother Love: poems by Rita Dove
In settings as various as a patio in Arizona, the bistros and boulevards of Paris, the sun-drenched pyramids of Mexico--and directly from the Greek myth itself--Rita Dove explores this relationship and the dilemma of letting go.
On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove
From the opening sequence, probing the private griefs and dreams of a working class family, to the emblematic grace of the living legend Rosa Parks, these poems explore the intersection of individual fates with the grand arc of history.

About Rita Dove

The African American Sonnet: a literary history by Timo Müller
Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel," Gwendolyn Brooks's "First fight. Then fiddle." Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets. Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present.
Crossing Color : transcultural space and place in Rita Dove's poetry, fiction, and drama by Therese Steffen
Rita Dove was elected Poet Laureate--the first ever African-American to hold the position--in 1993, in recognition of work that combines racially sensitive observation with searing and immediate personal experience. She is best known for her substantial body of poetry, although she has also been recognized for her many accomplishments in drama and fiction, written in both German and English. Crossing Color is the first full-length critical study offering a comprehensive biographic and literary portrait of Rita Dove and her work.
Into a Light Both Brilliant and Unseen: conversations with contemporary Black poets by Malin Pereira (Editor)
Interviews with leading contemporary African American poets offers an in-depth look at the cultural and aesthetic perspectives of the post-Black Arts Movement generation. This volume includes interviews with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells. Although these poets reject a rigid adherence to a specific Black aesthetic, their work effectively probes racism, stereotyping, and racial politics.

African American Women Writers

More about Rita Dove at ProQuest One Literature

By Rita Dove

More by Rita Dove

About Rita Dove