President Obama speaks and is joined by renowned poets reciting their work for a celebration of poetry at the White House. The first poet to recite was Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English in the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences.

I particularly enjoyed Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People” (Norton). In the wake of the boatloads of literature about Americans of non-European origin—much of it absolutely necessary, some of it heaved onboard by earnest opportunists and explorers of exotic perceptions—Painter’s meticulously researched yet eminently readable tome arrives on the scene not a minute too early. Of course, no one need tell me that the assignments of race, especially the supposedly innate characteristics based on skin color and facial features, are mostly mean-spirited constructs serving the human lust for power. Nevertheless, I was held spellbound for four hundred pages as the author, a Princeton professor, follows the historical shifts from pre-racial Greek civilization all the way to Anglo-American definitions of whiteness and the economically driven propaganda of Caucasian superiority.

An interview with Rita Dove about her newest collection "Sonata Mulattica

Another virtuoso book I want to recommend is Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a collection of stories by the Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin. I can't praise Mueenuddin's work too much: He has the gifts of insight into human behavior of Alice Munro, the gift for detail we find in Updike and William Trevor, and the ability to make sentences and paragraphs that pack the punch of something out of James Salter and Richard Ford.

Poet Rita Dove gives the star treatment to 19th-century violinist George Bridgetower, a biracial child prodigy and friend to Beethoven.

A virtuosic treatment of a virtuoso’s life, the poems use all registers—nursery rhymes, diary entries, drama—and are stuffed with historical and musical arcana. Yet the book remains highly accessible, reading much like a historical novel.

Rita Dove reads poems from her book "Sonata Mulattica" at the Virginia Festival of the Book 2009.

Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States poet laureate, has now breathed life into the story of that virtuoso, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, in her new book, “Sonata Mulattica” (W. W. Norton).

Sonata Mulattica is a book-length sequence of poems inspired by the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower, a 19th-century violin player born to a Polish mother and a West Indian father; Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata was originally dedicated to Bridgetower before the composer broke off his friendship with the musician after Bridgetower insulted a woman of Beethoven's acquaintance.