Besides her Pulitzer Prize, Dove has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them 29 honorary doctorates – most recently, in 2018, from Harvard University,[40] Smith College[41] and The University of Michigan,[42] and in 2022 from her graduate alma mater, The University of Iowa[43]—as well as, in 2014, from Yale University[44] and, in 2013, from Emerson College[45] and Emory University[46]). In 2016, she was the commencement speaker at The University of Virginia, which traditionally does not bestow honorary degrees.[47] Among the other institutions of higher learning that granted her honorary doctorates are her undergraduate alma mater Miami University, Knox College, Tuskegee University, University of Miami (Florida), Washington University in St. Louis, Case Western Reserve University, The University of Akron, Arizona State University, Boston College, Dartmouth College, Spelman College, The University of Pennsylvania, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Notre Dame, Northeastern University, Columbia University, SUNY Brockport, Washington & Lee University, Howard University, the Pratt Institute, Skidmore College and Duke University.[48]
Dove received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1994,[49][50] the National Humanities Medal / Charles Frankel Prize from President Bill Clinton in 1996,[51] the 3rd Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities in 1997,[52] and more recently, the 2006 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service in Literature, the 2007 Chubb Fellowship at Yale University,[53] the 2008 Library of Virginia Lifetime Achievement Award,[54] the 2009 Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal,[55] the 2009 Premio Capri[56] and the 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.[57][58][59] In 2014, she was honored with the Carole Weinstein Prize in poetry[60] and in 2015, as the first American, with the Poetry and People Prize in Guangdong, China. In 2016, she received the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement from Oregon State University.[61] Collected Poems 1974–2004, released in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award,[62] the winner of the NAACP Image Award in poetry and winner of the 2017 Library of Virginia Poetry Award.[63] Also in 2017, she received the Callaloo Lifetime Achievement Award,[64] followed in 2018 by The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement[65] and in 2019 by the Wallace Stevens Award[66] from the Academy of American Poets, the North Star Award (the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for lifetime achievement)[67],[68] the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal[69] from Harvard University and the Langston Hughes Medal[70] from City College of New York.
In 2021, Dove received the gold medal in poetry [71] from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the academy's highest honor, as the 16th poet (and only the 3rd female and 1st African-American) in the medals' 110-year history. The other fifteen poets who have received the medal since 1911 were James Whitcomb Riley, Edward 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.
In 2022, an official portrait of Dove by photographer Sanjay Suchak, commissioned by the University of Virginia, was unveiled and is prominently displayed in the front room of the university's historic Pavilion VII (Colonnade Club) on the West Lawn.[72] Also in 2022, she won the Library of Virginia Poetry Award for Playlist for the Apocalypse [2] and received two more lifetime achievement recognitions: a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation [73] and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.[74]
On Nov. 15, 2023, during the 74th National Book Awards ceremony in New York, Dove received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters as only the fourth poet in this lifetime achievement category, after Gwendolyn Brooks in 1994, Adrienne Rich in 2006 and John Ashbery in 2011. [75] This was followed by an Academy of American Poets Leadership Award [76] and the Thomas Robinson Prize for Southern Literature from Mercer University [77]in 2024.
Dove is a member of the American Philosophical Society,[78] the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where she serves as vice president for literature during the 2023 to 2026 board term,[79] the Fellowship of Southern Writers and PEN American Center. She was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1991,[80] and in 2018 she was named one of the Library of Virginia's Virginia Women in History.[81]
