Dana Gioia

Michael Dana Gioia (born December 24, 1950) is an American poet who quit his successful career as a corporate executive to write. Since January 29, 2003, he has been chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States government's arts agency, and has worked to revitalize an organization that had become gun-shy after the bitter controversies that surrounded it in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gioia has sought to encourage what he calls the only uniquely American form of art, jazz, as well as promoting William Shakespeare and trying to increase the number of Americans reading literature. Before taking the NEA post, Gioia was a resident of Santa Rosa, California.

Books

• Daily Horoscope (1986)
• Eugenio Montale's Motteti: Poem's of Love (translator) (1990)
• New Italian Poets (editor, with Michael Palma (1991)
• The Gods of Winter (1991)
• Can Poetry Matter? (1992)
• The Madness of Hercules (Hercules Furens) (translator). Included in Seneca: The Tragedies, Volume II, published by Johns Hopkins (1995)
• Certain Solitudes: On the Poetry of Donald Justice (editor, with William Logan) (1998)
• Interrogations at Noon (2001)
• California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (California Legacy) (editor, with others) (2003)
• Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry (Poets on Poetry) (2003)
• The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles (editor, with Scott Timberg) (2003)
• Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (2004)

Gioia has also written or co-written a number of texts used in college courses, including the anthology (edited with Dan Stone) 100 Great Poets of the English Language (2004).He is also the author of a great many essays and reviews.

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