Ohio's Akron is where Rita Dove was born. She studied at Miami University of Ohio, Universität Tübingen in Germany, and the University of Iowa, where she received her MFA in creative writing in 1977. She was a 1970 Presidential Scholar. Her third collection of poetry, Thomas and Beulah, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. She also held the position of U.S. Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995. The 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize goes to Dove.
Dove has received numerous honors, such as the Fulbright Association and the Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Medals, the 2014 Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Poetry. She is the 16th poet—and third woman and first African American—to win the Medal in its 110-year history. She was the only poet in history to receive both the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton in 1996 and the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2011. To date, Yale University, Emory University, Smith College, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa have awarded Dove 29 honorary doctorates.
She has held positions as chancellor of Phi Beta Kappa, president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her affiliations include the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She holds the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing position at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville..

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