Rita Dove, a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and Special Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress bicentennial in 1999/2000, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004–2006. In 1987 she received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her book Thomas and Beulah. She has received honorary doctorates from 28 institutions of higher learning, the 1996 National Humanities Medal, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award in the Literary Arts, the 2011 National Medal of Arts and numerous other awards and honors. Her 2021 book Playlist for the Apocalypse, is her first volume of new poems since her NAACP Image Award-winning Collected Poems: 1974-2004. 

Co-Sponsored by the Borchard Foundation Center on the Literary Arts, University of Arizona Office of Faculty Affairs, and University of Arizona Health Sciences Innovations in Healthy Aging