First African American U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove
Inprint, Houston’s premier literary arts nonprofit organization, launches its 2021/2022 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series with a livestream event featuring the first African American U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove on Monday, August 30, 7 pm CT. Dove will give a brief reading from her new collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, followed by a conversation with Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Tradition. This livestream event will be held online via the Inprint “virtual studio.” Season tickets and $5 general admission tickets are on sale now on the Inprint website.
Discounted books are available to Inprint patrons for purchase through Brazos Bookstore. For more information, visit Inprint’s website at inprinthouston.org or call 713.521.2026.
About RITA DOVE, the Los Angeles Times writes, “Few contemporary poets are this capacious, this capable, this serious, and this pleasurable to read.” In 1993, Dove was the first African American to be named U.S. Poet Laureate and has spent a lifetime generating popular interest in the literary arts. Her 10 earlier poetry collections include Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; On the Bus with Rosa Parks, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Sonata Mulattica, winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; and Collected Poems: 1974-2004, a finalist for the National Book Award.
Dove will read from and talk about her first poetry collection in more than a decade Playlist for the Apocalypse, which provides poignant meditations on mortality and injustice throughout human history. The Boston Globe calls it “a piercing, unflinching new volume that offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from perhaps the best public poet we have.” Dwight Garner writes in The New York Times, “Playlist for the Apocalypse, Rita Dove’s new book of poems, is among her best…about life in what she calls this ‘shining, blistered republic.'” Dove is also the author of the short story collection Fifth Sunday, the novel Through the Ivory Gate, and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which was produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and the Royal National Theatre in London. She is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of the Arts, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and the NAACP Image Award. Dove is also a trained ballroom dancer, composer, cellist, and gambist and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The series is presented by Inprint, a Houston-based nonprofit literary arts organization dedicated to inspiring readers and writers. Since 1980, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series has featured nearly 400 of the world’s greatest writers from 36 countries, including winners of 10 Nobel Prizes, 64 Pulitzer Prizes, 57 National Book Awards, 51 National Book Critics Circle Awards, and 16 Booker Prizes, as well as 19 U.S. Poets Laureate. The series and Inprint receive generous underwriting support from The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, the Houston Endowment, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. The series is presented in association with Brazos Bookstore and the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.