Darker Face of the Earth

Rita Dove received the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, Thomas and Beulah, in 1987, and she served as US Poet Laureate from 1993¬ to 1995. Her drama, The Darker Face of the Earth, opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1996 and the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1997, followed by its European premiere at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1999. Her song cycle, Seven for Luck, with music by John Williams, premiered in 1998, and her 2020 song cycle, A Standing Witness, fourteen poems with music by Richard Danielpour, was sung by Susan Graham at the Kennedy Center in 2021. W. W. Norton published Dove’s latest volume of poems, Playlist for the Apocalypse, in 2021.Rita Dove’s numerous honors include the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2021 Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as the sixteenth—and third female and first African American—poet in the Medal’s 110-year history. She is the recipient of both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, making her the only poet ever to receive both. To date, she has received twenty-nine honorary doctorates. She teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.