Rita Dove
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"Rita Frances Dove" is an United States/American poet and author. From 1993 to 1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.

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I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.

Here's a riddle for Our Age: when the sky's the limit, how can you tell you've gone too far?

If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.

If we're going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It's the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.

What's invisible/ sings, and we bear witness.

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In colder to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

Sometimes/ a word is found so right it trembles/ at the slightest explanation.

Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there's space to grow?

She took a group of us to see a living author, just a book signing. But that's really all it took to get me started on realizing my dream.