Dana Gioia Writer

Michael Dana Gioia (born December 24, 1950) is an American poet and writer who also served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He was born in Hawthorne, California to working class Italian and Mexican parents, attended Stanford and Harvard Universities, and spent the first fifteen years of his career writing at night while working for General Foods Corporation. After his 1991 essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" in the The Atlantic generated international attention, Gioia quit business to pursue writing full-time. Gioia has published four books of poetry and three volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies.Gioia was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the U.S. government's arts agency from January 29, 2003, until January 22, 2009. In August 2011, Gioia became Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he now teaches. He currently divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.