September
24, 2004
Acclaimed
Poet Rita Dove to Read at Mount Holyoke October 4
 Photo by: Fred Viebahn
Rita Dove |
Internationally
celebrated poet Rita Dove will read from her new collection of
poems American Smooth at 7 pm in Gamble Audi
torium on Monday, October 4. The event is sponsored by the English
department and the Odyssey Bookshop. A reception will follow
the reading, and the author will sign books available for purchase
in the museum lobby before and after the reading.
Dove served as poet laureate of the United States and consultant to the Library
of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and is currently poet laureate of the Commonwealth
of Virginia. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them
the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and, most recently, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership
Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee
Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996
Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, and the 1996 National Humanities Medal.
“Rita Dove has been an important presence in American poetry for many years—even
before her service as poet laureate of the United States,” Professor of
English Robert B. Shaw said. “She is an exciting poet not only in her accomplishments
but in her capacity for growth. Each new book of hers shows her refining earlier
techniques and themes even as she develops new ones. On the technical level she
is remarkable for her ability to combine lyric and narrative qualities in her
poems. In her Pulitzer Prize volume Thomas and Beulah and in many later works,
she records the history of African Americans in vignettes that have the visual
clarity of indelible childhood memories and a verbal eloquence that is as natural
as it is powerful.”
Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University
of Virginia.
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