Rita Dove was born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio. Her father was research chemist Ray Dove, who was one of the first Black chemists to work in the tire industry. She graduated from high school as a Presidential Scholar and would later graduate summa cum laude from Miami University in 1973. In 1974 and 1975 she held a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1977. It was at the University of Iowa that she would meet her husband, the German writer Fred Viebahn, who was a Fulbright fellow in the International Writing Program there.
Dove published her first of many...
