Ms. Dove is Commonwealth professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  She is author of nine books of poetry.  Her latest collection, “Sonata Mulattica,” was just published 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.  Ms. Dove served as poet laureate of the United States and consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995.  Her awards include 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.  For the White House’s 1999-2000 New Year’s celebration, Ms. Dove contributed a poem to Steven Spielberg’s “The Unfinished Journey” and read her poem at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams’s music.    

            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 University of Tübingen in Germany from 1974 to 1975. 

“Within a couple of months after my arrival in Germany I was speaking, laughing, even dreaming in what used to be a foreign language. I was discovering the many types of persuasion a language employs -- its textures and cadences, its architecture and plasticity -- to describe experience. And for the first time, I saw my own country from another vantage point. My German classmates regarded the United States as a land of Technicolor riches and abominable poverty, of exalted beliefs and intransigent racism; the more I pointed out the errors in their simplistic appraisals, the more complicated everything I had taken for granted became -- democracy, equality, belief in a common truth. But while I insisted that not all African-Americans lived in either Harlem or the Deep South, I remembered what my American history textbooks had reported and what they had chosen to ignore. This fascination with the underside of History -- its vanquished and oppressed people, its ordinary citizens and unsung heroes -- has occupied me ever since and has been a major influence on my poetry.

“The biggest influence Fulbright has had on my life transpired tangentially, however: my marriage to the German writer Fred Viebahn. After my return from Germany, in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I volunteered to translate the lecture of the visiting German Fulbright Fellow. And the rest, as they say, is history -- not with a capital H but a small one, the story behind the Big Story -- and that's the very best kind.”

The Fulbright Program is an international educational exchange initiative administered by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.  It was created in 1946 by legislation sponsored by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas.  There are Fulbright exchanges between the United States and more than 150 other countries.  There are more than 275,000 Fulbright alumni throughout the world.

            The Fulbright Association is a private, nonprofit organization of Fulbright alumni and friends committed to advancing international education and people-to-people diplomacy.  It has 46 chapters throughout the United States and collaborates with more than 70 sister Fulbright alumni organizations abroad.  The Fulbright Association inaugurated the biennial Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal Dinner in 2000 to recognize the important role Fulbright grantees have had in creating a better future for communities throughout the world.

Rita Dove says: “Although the words ‘Lifetime Achievement’ seem to imply that I am way older than I feel – after all, my Fulbright experience in Germany happened a mere 35 years ago – I appreciate this medal both as an acknowledgment of what I’ve accomplished and, in the spirit of William Fulbright, as a hearty nudge: not to rest on my laurels but to press forward and continue my quest for educational enrichment.  After all, if cats have nine lives, why can’t we?”

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