Bowling Green State University Department of English and University Arts proudly welcome Rita Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate and Virginia Poet Laureate, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. This event is free and open to the public.

Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she attended Miami University of Ohio, Universität Tübingen in Germany (as a Fulbright fellow) and the University of Iowa. In 1987 she received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, from 1993-1995 she served as U.S. Poet Laureate, and from 2004-2006 as Poet Laureate of Virginia. Author of a novel, a short story collection, a book of essays, and nine volumes of poetry -- most recently Sonata Mulattica (winner of the 2010 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award) and Collected Poems 1974-2004 (winner of a 2017 NAACP Image Award and the 2017 Library of Virginia Award for Poetry) -- she also edited The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry, which was published in 2011. Her song cycle Seven for Luck, with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony, and her play The Darker Face of the Earth had successful runs at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center in Washington and the Royal National Theatre in London, among other venues.

Two Question & Answer sessions for students are scheduled with Rita Dove on Thursday, Sept. 20 at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., in the Thomas B. and Kathleen M. Donnell Theatre, inside the Wolfe Center for the Arts.

The Edwin H. Simmons Creative Minds Series is funded by a private donation.