It's the birthday of poet Rita Dove, born in Akron, Ohio (1952).

Her father encouraged his daughter to take advantage of education, and she was at the top of her class. Her parents assumed that she would go on to become a doctor or lawyer, so when she announced she wanted to be a poet, they weren't sure what to make of it. She said, "[My father] swallowed once and said, 'Well, I've never understood poetry, so don't be upset if I don't read it."

Her teachers at college told her that she was throwing her education away if she didn't study something more practical. But with her poetry collection Thomas and Beulah (1986), based loosely on the lives of her grandparents, she became only the second African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and she went on to become the first African American National Poet Laureate. Her new book of poems, American Smooth, comes out next month.

She wrote, "Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful ... like a bouillon cube: You carry it around and then it nourishes you when you need it."