February 16, 2012 — University of Virginia English professor and poet Rita Dove – whom President Obama honored this week with the National Medal of Arts – sits with PBS journalist Bill Moyers for this weekend's "Moyers & Company" to discuss poetry's power to move people. Dove also will read from her own works. The episode will air locally on Feb. 19 at noon on WHTJ, channel 41.

Dove and Moyers also will take turns reading "The Hill" by Edgar Lee Masters, which is already online. The poem is included in "The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry," edited by Dove and published in October.

Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English in the College of Arts & Sciences, was U.S. poet laureate and consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995. Among her nine poetry collections are "Sonata Mulattica," "American Smooth," and "On the Bus with Rosa Parks." She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for "Thomas and Beulah" in 1987.

— By Anne Bromley