[1] Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia[2] from 2004 to 2006.

[9] Dove also served as a Special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1999/2000, along with Louise Glück and W. S. Merwin.

Since 1991, she has been on the jury of the annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards—from 1991 to 1996 together with Ashley Montagu and Henry Louis Gates; from 1997 to 2023 with Gates, Joyce Carol Oates, Simon Schama, Stephen Jay Gould (until his death in 2002) and Steven Pinker (who replaced Gould in 2002), and since 2023 with Pinker, Peter Ho Davies, Tiya Miles and Natasha Tretheway.

Dove's work cannot be confined to a specific era or school in contemporary literature; her wide-ranging topics and the precise poetic language with which she captures complex emotions defy easy categorization.

Her most famous work to date is Thomas and Beulah, published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in 1986, a collection of poems loosely based on the lives of her maternal grandparents, for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

Dove has published eleven volumes of poetry, a book of short stories (Fifth Sunday, 1985), a collection of essays (The Poet's World, 1995), and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992).

Her Collected Poems 1974–2004 was released by W. W. Norton in 2016; it carries an excerpt from President Barack Obama's 2011 National Medal of Arts commendation on its back cover.

For "America's Millennium", the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Dove contributed — in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams' music — a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey.

[17] She also provided the texts for Pulitzer Prize winner Tania Leon's musical works "Singin' Sepia" (1996),[18] "Reflections" (2006) [19] and "The Crossing Choir" (forthcoming),[20] among other collaborations with multiple composers, most recently on "A Standing Witness" with Richard Danielpour.

[28] As Dove explained in her foreword and in media interviews, she had originally selected works by Plath, Ginsberg and Brown but these as well as some other poets were omitted against her editorial wishes; their contributions had to be removed from print-ready copy at the very last minute because their publisher forbade their inclusion due to a disagreement with Penguin over permission fees.

[36] The annual "Rita Dove Poetry Award" was established by Salem College Center for Women Writers in 2004.

The documentary film Rita Dove: An American Poet by Eduardo Montes-Bradley premiered at the Paramount Theater on January 31, 2014.

Since 2015, Rita Dove's poem, Cozy Apologia, has been a part of the WJEC Edquas GCSE English Literature specification in England and Wales, featuring in its poetry anthology.

The other fifteen poets who have received the medal since 1911 were James Whitcomb Riley, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Conrad Aiken, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, John Crowe Ransom, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand and Louise Glück.

[76] This was followed by an Academy of American Poets Leadership Award [77] and the Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature from Mercer University [78]in 2024.