Her award-winning play, The Darker Face of the Earth, had successful runs at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center in Washington and the Royal National Theatre in London.

Spanning forty-plus years with translations on all continents, her oeuvre includes many genres besides her numerous poetry collections – most recently Playlist for the Apocalypse – she has authored short stories, essays, the novel Through the Ivory Gate, and the song cycles Seven for Luck (1998, music by John Williams) and A Standing Witness (with composer Richard Danielpour, premiered by Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Susan Graham in 2021). (Oct.Rita Dove received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Thomas and Beulah and served as U.S. Dove could have experimented more daringly with her obvious narrative gifts. Virginia seems to gain knowledge-without being deeply changed by it. The climactic love scene, for example, ends in the disappointment of cliche (``When he touched her again their bodies merged into one long, yearning curve, and the sea rose up to meet them''), and the novel's single real surprise, a revelation of incest, is less shocking than puzzling and unprepared for. The narrative is smooth and accomplished, but takes few risks. Poets turned novelists often rely too heavily on lyricism and imagery to sustain them, to the detriment of plot and exposition Dove, however, leans a little too far in the opposite direction. The story moves back and forth between the present, which finds her teaching puppetry to children, and her past, which includes memories of a constricting community and family life and the liberation offered by college and her stint with a communal puppet theater. Virginia King, a talented young black woman, returns to her hometown of Akron, Ohio, as artist-in-residence at an elementary school. In her first novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Dove ( Grace Notes ) covers territory familiar from her poems.

Through the ivory gate by rita dove