Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she attended Miami University of Ohio, Universität Tübingen in Germany, and the University of Iowa, where she earned her creative writing MFA in 1977. In 1987 she received the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, Thomas and Beulah, and from 1993­ to 1995 she served as U.S. Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress.