Rita Dove (1952– ) was born in Akron, Ohio, to parents who greatly valued education. She began writing plays and stories at an early age. When a high-school teacher took her to a local writers' conference, she began to consider writing as a career. A high school Presidential Scholar in 1970, she went on to graduate from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She won a Fulbright scholarship to study in West Germany in 1974 and later did graduate work at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. Dove has received a Guggenheim, a Lavan Younger Poets award, a Mellon Foundation grant, a Walt Whitman award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1993 she became the first African American to be named poet laureate of the United States, an honor which she stated is "significant in terms of the message it sends about the diversity of our culture and our literature." In 1987, Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; she was the first AfricanAmerican to do so since Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950.

Dove's poetry collections include The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), and Mother Love (1995). In addition to her poetry, Dove has also published Fifth Sunday (1985), a collection of short stories, and Through the Ivory Gate (1992), a novel. Currently Dove teaches English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.