The Believer, a ten-time National Magazine Award finalist, is a bimonthly literature, arts, and culture magazine based at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute, a department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In each issue, readers will find journalism, essays, intimate interviews, an expansive comics section, poetry, and on occasion, delightful and unexpected bonus items. Our poetry section is curated by Jericho Brown, Kristen Radtke selects our comics, and Joshua Wolf Shenk is our editor-in-chief. Issues feature a column by Nick Hornby, in which he discusses the things he's been reading, as well as a comedy advice column.

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding the world’s experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives—the simmering resentment of a lift operator, an octogenarian’s exuberant mambo, the mordant humour of a philosophising cricket. Audaciously playful yet grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.

In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding the world's experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history's grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives-the simmering resentment of a lift operator, an octogenarian's exuberant mambo, the mordant humour of a philosophising cricket. Audaciously playful yet grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to apocalyptic failures of the human soul.

In settings as various as a patio in Arizona, the bistros and boulevards of Paris, the sun-drenched pyramids of Mexico and directly from the Greek myth itself Rita Dove explores this relationship and the dilemma of letting go."

Rita Dove's Collected Poems: 1974-2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of US poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove's reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialisation and the civil right struggles. The multifaceted gems of Grace Notes, the reinvention of Greek myth in the sonnets of Mother Love, the troubling rapids of recent history in On the Bus with Rosa Parks and the homage to America's kaleidoscopic cultural heritage in American Smooth all celebrate Dove's mastery of narrative context with lyrical finesse.

With this her fourth book of poems, Rita Dove expands her role as a leading voice in contemporary American letters. The title of the collection serves as an umbrella for the intimate concerns expressed in the forty-eight poems; in music, grace notes are those added to the basic melody, the embellishments that—if played or sung at the right moment with just the right touch—can break your heart.

Isn't this what every lyric poem wishes to be, the poet asks as she explored autobiographical events, most from childhood and the cusp of adolescence, and then turns to the shadowy areas of regret and memory. The word as talisman is another of her concerns, and finally, in the section that most typifies the lilt of grace notes, Dove considers the embellishments below the melody of daily life.

"What will impress readers most about Grace Notes is [Dove's] craftsmanship, the richness of her imagery, the delicacy and sureness of her ear. She is moving steadily toward an absolute mastery of her art."—Minneapolis Star Tribune

An occasion to celebrate: a new collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate; her first since "On the Bus with Rosa Parks." With the grace of an Astaire, Rita Dove's magnificent poems pay homage to our kaleidoscopic cultural heritage; from the glorious shimmer of an operatic soprano to Bessie Smith's mournful wail; from paradise lost to angel food cake; from hotshots at the local shooting range to the Negro jazz band in World War I whose music conquered Europe before the Allied advance. Like the ballroom-dancing couple of the title poem, smiling and making the difficult seem effortless, Dove explores the shifting surfaces between perception and intimation.

The Darker Face of the Earth, a play by the poet laureate of the United States, creates a human drama of classical proportions. Behind the facade of antebellum Southern plantation life unfolds a mysterious tale of interracial love and strife, guilt and suffering, as both slave and master struggle against a fate that threatens to eclipse them altogether.

In time for the holiday season, a beautiful paperback edition of Penguin's landmark poetry anthology
Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, introduces readers to the most significant and compelling poems of the past hundred years in "The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry." Now available in paperback, this indispensable volume represents the full spectrum of aesthetic sensibilities--with varying styles, voices, themes, and cultures--while balancing important poems with vital periods of each poet. Featuring earlier works by Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson, and Wallace Stevens along with examples from the new generation of critically acclaimed poets, including A. E. Stallings, Terrance Hayes, and Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, Dove's selections paint a dynamic and cohesive portrait of modern American poetry.

The Darker Face of the Earth, a play by the poet laureate of the United States, creates a human drama of classical proportions. Behind the facade of antebellum Southern plantation life unfolds a mysterious tale of interracial love and strife, guilt and suffering, as both slave and master struggle against a fate that threatens to eclipse them altogether.

The son of a white woman and an "African Prince," George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780-1860) travels to Vienna to meet "bad-boy" genius Ludwig van Beethoven. The great composer's subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto, but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale. A New Yorker's A Year's Reading; Booklist Editors Choice Award.

In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, "Cameos," to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history.

Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people.  Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove's collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, a verse cycle loosely based on her grandparents' lives.  Precisely yet intensely felt, resonant with the voices of ordinary people, Rita Dove's Selected Poems is marked by lyric intensity and compassionate storytelling.

Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than a hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, and Justin Philip Reed, combined with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Evie Shockley, and Meta DuEwa Jones. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation's first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice, to ask, "What's next for Black poetic expression?

Featured in the film "The Great Debaters," Melvin B. Tolson was not only a debate coach but one of black America's most important modernist voices. This first complete collection of his poetic work, brilliantly annotated by Raymond Nelson, gives Tolson his proper place in American poetry.

Published to coincide with its British premiere at the Royal National Theatre, The Darker Face of the Earth is Rita Dove's first play. Set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina, it has been performed to great critical acclaim.

A debut novel by the 1987 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. When a woman returns to her Midwestern hometown as an artist-in-residence to teach puppetry to schoolchildren, her homecoming also means dealing with memories of racism, rejected love--and truths about her family. Author readings.

A mid an "explosion in the interest of poetry nationwide" (The New York Times), The Best American Poetry 2000 delivers one of the finest volumes yet in this renowned series. Guest editor Rita Dove, a distinguished figure in the poetry world and the second African-American poet ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, brings all of her dynamism and well-honed acumen to bear on this project. Dove used a simple yet exacting method to make her selections: "The final criterion," she writes in her introduction, "was Emily Dickinson's famed description -- if I felt that the top of my head had been taken off, the poem was in." The result is a marvelous collection of consistently high-quality poems diverse in form, tone, style, stance, and subject matter. With comments from the poets themselves illuminating their poems and a foreword by series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2000 is this year's must-have book for all poetry lovers.

The son of a white woman and an "African Prince," George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780-1860) travels to Vienna to meet "bad-boy" genius Ludwig van Beethoven. The great composer's subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto, but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale.

Marking the end of Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove's two-year term as Poet Laureate of the United States, this new collection again confirms her extraordinary power and grace as a poet. Mother Love calls upon the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to examine the tenacity of love between mother and daughter, two tumblers locked in an eternal somersault: each mother a daughter; each daughter a potential mother.