Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995.

She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, more recently, in  2006 she received the coveted Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service (together with Anderson Cooper, John Glenn, Mike Nicholsa and Queen Noor of Jordan, in 2007 she became a Chubb Fellow at Yale University, in 2008 she was honored with the Library of Virginia's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2009 she received the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal and the Premio Capri (the international prize of the Italian "island of poetry").

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), 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 other theatres. Her latest poetry collection, Sonata Mulattica, was published by W.W. Norton & Company in the spring of 2009. In addition Dove is the editor of the new Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011).

Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.