Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio, USA) is a United States poet and author. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995.

She received her undergraduate degree in English in 1973 from Miami University of Ohio and spent two semesters as a Fulbright Scholar at the Universität Tübingen in Germany. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1977.

Her most famous work is Thomas and Beulah (1986), a collection of poems based on the lives of her grandparents, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987.

She taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989 and now holds the chair as Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

External links

• Achievement.org interview with online video, full bio and photo gallery
• The Rita Dove Homepage - A Brief Biography
• Comprehensive Biography of Rita Dove
• Rita Dove: Online Poems
• IMDb entry for Rita Dove