Daniel Mark Epstein, author, poet, and Kenyon alumni, will lead the Knox Reads! Adult Book Discussion on “Collected Poem: 1974-2004,” by Rita Dove, on Tuesday, October 16, 7:00 p.m. at the Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County, 201 N. Mulberry Street, Mount Vernon.
Knox Reads! is an annual community-reading event celebrating the work of one chosen author each fall. The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement will be awarded to Dove at a gala dinner in New York City on November 7. Then on November 9, she will travel to Gambier to present the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture. The week leading up to Dove’s keynote lecture will feature readings, lectures, discussions, writing workshops, and more.
The Los Angeles Times praised the book as “an absolutely astounding body of work…casting her poems in modes that are alternately, or sometimes simultaneously, accessible, experimental, academic and quotidian. Few contemporary poets are this capacious, this capable, this serious and this pleasurable to read.”
Dove, a native of Akron, served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton.
President Barack Obama presented her with the 2011 National Medal of Arts, which made her the only poet with both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts to her credit. To date, 27 honorary doctorates have been bestowed upon Rita Dove, most recently by Yale University in 2014 and by Smith College and Harvard University in 2018.
She has published the poetry collections “The Yellow House on the Corner” (1980), “Museum” (1983), “Thomas and Beulah” (1986), “Grace Notes” (1989), “Selected Poems” (1993), “Mother Love (1995),” “On the Bus with Rosa Parks” (1999), “American Smooth” (2004), and “Sonata Mulattica,” a book of short stories, “Fifth Sunday” (1985), the novel “Through the Ivory Gate” (1992), essays under the title ‘The Poet’s World’ (1995), and the play “The Darker Face of the Earth,” which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London, and in many other venues. “Seven for Luck,” a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. For “America’s Millennium,” the White House’s 1999/2000 New Year’s celebration, Ms. Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams’s music — a poem to Steven Spielberg’s documentary “The Unfinished Journey.”
Her latest book, “Collected Poems 1974-2004,” was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the NAACP Image Award in Poetry. Dove holds the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn. They have a grown daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn.
At the Brown Bag Chat on Wednesday, October 24, noon, the Kenyon Review will host a conversation about Dove’s poetry at the main library. Participants are welcome to bring a brown bag lunch. Beverages and snacks will be served.
To pick up a copy of the book or for more information, stop by the main library or call 740-392-BOOK (2665), visit www.knox.net or email communityrelations@knox.net