Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in August 1952. Her father, Ray Dove, was the first African American chemist in the tire and rubber industry. Although her mother, Elvira Hord, didn’t advance past high school she loved to read as an honors student and surrounded Rita in intellectualism while Dove was growing up (Contemporary, 1994).

In the steps of her mother, Dove scored within the top one hundred students in the nation as a high school senior, thus becoming a presidential scholar allowing her to visit the White House in 1970. She then went on to study at Miami University in Ohio and graduated with honors. The following year she attended Tubingen University in West Germany at on a Fulbright Scholarship, then moved back to the U.S. and studied at the University Of Iowa.

In college, Dove lacked self confidence as a writer, but those who knew her well (including her family and her professors) encouraged her to keep writing. After graduating from the University of Iowa, she began publishing her short stories, poems, periodicals, chapbooks, and finally compiled them into book form. Shortly thereafter, she met her husband, German-born Fred Viebahn, and later had a daughter named Aviva.

In 1993, Dove was elected poet laureate of the United States at age 40, making her both the youngest author to hold the position and the first African American poet laureate. As poet laureate she worked particularly hard at spreading the word about poetry and increasing public awareness of the benefits of literature (Contemporary, 2003).

Many readers expect that Dove would write about her experiences in discrimination as a black woman, but this isn’t necessarily the case. She states "obviously as a black woman, I am concerned with race . . . but certainly not every poem of mine mentions the fact of being black. They are poems about humanity, and sometimes humanity happens to be black. I cannot run from, I won’t run from any kind of truth" (Contemporary, 2003).

Rita Dove’s work cannot be easily pinned down into any era or period in literature, except that it is conemporary in the sense that it’s current and true to the mind of today. Her poetry is also political in voice, with an accurate message. She relates her poetry back to her life making it relevant to herself, and at the same time writes poetry in advocacy for others.

For example, one of her most famous collections of poetry is called Thomas and Beulah and is about her maternal grandparents, and her grandfather’s move north from the "Tennessee Ridge," to the north in 1919 with nothing more than hope and a mandolin (Contemporary, 1994). She told Steven Schneider from the Iowa Review that she "was after the essence of [her] grandparent’s existence and their survival," proving once again that her work constantly reaches for a grip on the human condition.

The human condition is indeed a main concerns in Rita Dove’s poetry. Whether based on her own life, things that happen around her, or are products of pure imagination, her poems always fall back to the central concept of empathy, thus creating empathy in the reader. She strives for clarity in understanding others and feeling things they experience, but on a deeper level than most writers. Syntax and diction are her strongest weapons.

Dove uses her exceptional ability with these tools in her poem "Parsley," written about General Trujillo’s slaughter of thousands of Haitian blacks because they apparently could not correctly pronounce the "r" in the word perejil, which is the Spanish word for parsley, literally driving the General into madness (Rubin 1985 ).

Dove’s surroundings were condensation that trickled and poured into her writing, influenced by writers who successfully presented the human condition before her: Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks (Thomas, 1995). These authors’ first person narrative/stream of consciousness style revealed cahracters’ hearts, souls, and emotions which is reflected in Dove’s work.

Rita Dove presents poetic voice with a point, and her work effectively gains the readers’ empathy and care. Dove’s poetry also makes the readers want to return to mull over it a second and third time. It’s movement and form are remarkable and unique, and it’s nice to know that someone with small-town roots can make such an impact on the literary world today.