Rita Dove
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Doveis an American poet and author. From 1993 to 1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African-American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position. Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 August 1952
CityAkron, OH
mother children book
Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.
teacher children trying
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
children thinking talent
I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.
children writing childish-things
I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.
children growing-up heart
If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.
children tough-times together
If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.
children matter should
We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.
children book pages-turning
From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.
age-and-aging gone riddle
Here's a riddle for Our Age: when the sky's the limit, how can you tell you've gone too far?
failed heard interest lack literature moved people understand
For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.
book group living realizing took
She took a group of us to see a living author, just a book signing. But that's really all it took to get me started on realizing my dream.
discover enjoy lots love poets process revision younger
In working on a poem,I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
school thinking white
As an African-American, as a woman I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important.
war moving thinking
I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.