|
Dana Gioia is a poet and critic. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which received the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), which won the Poets’ Prize. His critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. He has written four opera libretti and edited twenty literary anthologies.
Gioia was born in Los Angeles in 1950, the son of a Sicilian father and Mexican-American mother. He was the first person in his family to attend college. He attended Stanford as an undergraduate and Harvard as a doctoral student in comparative literature before leaving to obtain an MBA at Stanford Business School. For fifteen years he worked in business in New York before quitting in 1992 to become a full-time writer.
Gioia is the former Poet Laureate of California. He also served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009. For nine years Gioia was the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.
|
