2009 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal Recipient

 Poet laureate of the United States and consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995, Rita Dove is Commonwealth professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She has received many honors, including the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 1996 National Humanities Medal. In 2006, she received the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service with Anderson Cooper, John Glenn, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan. Ms. Dove graduated summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio and received her master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa. She was a Fulbright fellow at the Universität Tübingen in Germany in 1974-75. She is author of nine books of poetry. Her latest collection, "Sonata Mulattica," was published in spring 2009 by W.W. Norton. She has also written short stories, a novel, essays, and the play "The Darker Face of the Earth," which was produced at the Kennedy Center and at the Royal National Theatre in London. For 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 "The Unfinished Journey."