The Library of Congress Recognizes Rita Dove for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry

Rita Dove, the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, received the 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for lifetime achievement from the Library of Congress.

Professor Dove has published 11 collections of poetry including her latest book Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems (W.W. Norton, 2021) and Collected Poems, 1974-2004 (2016). In addition to poetry, Dove has published a book of short stories and the novel Through the Ivory Gate (Pantheon, 1992).

The 2022 Bobbitt Prize marks the 17th time the award has been given. In its lifetime achievement citation for Professor Dove, the Bobbitt jury wrote that “her new collection, as well as [her] dazzling decades-long work in poetry, brings honor to this prize.” The panel also said Playlist From the Apocalypse is “quintessential Rita Dove: ethical and lyrical, moving in and out of the whirlwind that is history, playful in her use of form – sonnets, odes, addresses, invocations, aubades – and generous in her gathering of different voices and tribes to her pages.”

Professor Dove, who served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987. She is the first poet to receive the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts.

Professor Dove is a summa cum laude graduate of Miami University in Ohio, where she majored in English. She holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa. Professor Dove joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in 1989.