On the wings of a Dove: a collection of literary conversations with poet Rita Dove, from the University Press of Mississippi and other offbeat treasures covering the arts.

Rita Dove, a former Poet Laureate of the United States, likes interviews. She subjects herself to them readily, particularly in-depth, literary interviews by scholars who have read and thought about her work, as opposed to drive-by chats with journalists who may or may not have. Dove says she submits to the interviews about literature because she has benefited from reading about the work life of other writers. As a young writer, she learned patience, for instance, from reading that when Toni Morrison writes in the morning, she waits for the sun's rays to hit her blank paper just right before she begins to put words on it.

Now in a new book from the University Press of Mississippi, scholar Earl Ingersoll has collected some of the best of Dove's literary conversations, spanning a decade and a half, for all of us to enjoy. We can learn more about her writing techniques, as well as about the soul of the woman who produces such poetic treasures. She writes poems in longhand, for example, with just the right fountain pen and lined paper, but her prose is done on a word processor, and with soft baroque or medieval instrumentals a backdrop.

"At a certain point, I do read a poem aloud to myself, because it's also got to work for me as music," Dove told two writers in 1985. "I never want to lose that part of a poem."

Her many avocations, including her family, inspire her work, Dove says. She regrets that she has rarely been asked about her private world, but in real life she plays the viola de gamba, does crossword puzzles, and dabbles in singing and ballroom dancing. Dove was born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio, where her father was the first black chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. She graduated summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio and is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and earned a master's degree as a Fulbright scholar studying in Germany.

In 1993, Dove became the youngest and first black woman ever to become the nation's Poet Laureate. She was the second African American woman to be appointed Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress, following Gwendolyn Brooks in 1985. She has published more than a half-dozen collections of poetry, a novel, Through the Ivory Gate (Vintage Books, October 1993, ISBN 0-679-74240-9) and a play, The Darker Face of Earth (Story Line Press, September 2000, ISBN 1-885-26694-4). She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, September 1987, ISBN 0-887-48021-7), a collection of poem sequences based roughly on her grandparents' lives.

Conversations With Rita Dove, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll (University Press of Mississippi, June 2003, ISBN 1-578-06549-6), is part of the publisher's Literary Conversations Series. It includes a chronology and bibliography. Ingersoll is distinguished teaching professor of English emeritus at the State University of New York College at Brockport.