page_title: Rita Dove
section_title: Awards and honors
hierarchical_section_title: Rita Dove / Awards and honors
caption_attribution_description: English: I took photo with Canon camera at Maine State Library in Augusta.
context_page_description: Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. 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 to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.
context_section_description: Besides her Pulitzer Prize, Rita Dove has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them 28 honorary doctorates - most recently, in 2018, from Harvard University, Smith College and The University of Michigan, as well as, in 2014, from Yale University and, in 2013, from Emerson College and Emory University). In 2016, she was the commencement speaker at The University of Virginia, which traditionally does not bestow honorary degrees. Among the other institutions of higher learning that granted her honorary doctorates are Miami University of Ohio, Knox College, Tuskegee University, The University of Miami (Florida), Washington University, Case Western Reserve University, The University of Akron, Arizona State University, Boston College, Dartmouth College, Spelman College, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The University of Notre Dame, Northeastern University, Columbia University, SUNY Brockport, Washington & Lee University, Howard University, the Pratt Institute, Skidmore College and Duke University.
  Rita Dove received the National Humanities Medal / Charles Frankel Prize from President Bill Clinton in 1996, the 3rd Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities in 1997, and more recently, the 2006 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service in Literature, the 2007 Chubb Fellowship at Yale University, the 2008 Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2009 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, the 2009 Premio Capri and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. In 2014, she was honored with the Carole Weinstein Prize in poetry and in 2015, as the first American, with the Poetry and People Prize in Guangdong, China. In 2016, she received the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement from Oregon State University. Collected Poems 1974–2004, released in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the winner of the NAACP Image Award in poetry and winner of the 2017 Library of Virginia Poetry Award. Also in 2017 she received the Callaloo Lifetime Achievement Award, followed in 2018 by The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement and in 2019 by the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the North Star Award (the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for lifetime achievement), the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University and the Langston Hughes Medal from City College of New York. 
  She has been a featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival on many occasions, most recently in 2014. The annual "Rita Dove Poetry Award" was established by Salem College Center for Women Writers in 2004. The documentary film Rita Dove: An American Poet by Eduardo Montes-Bradley premiered at the Paramount Theater on January 31, 2014.
  Rita Dove is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fellowship of Southern Writers and PEN American Center. She is a long-serving juror of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. She was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1991, and in 2018 she was named one of the Library of Virginia's Virginia Women in History.
caption: Poet Laureate Rita Dove's definition of a library at the entrance to the Maine State Library in Augusta, Maine
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