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.

Early years

Michael Dana Gioia—he does not use his first name and pronounces his surname "JOY-uh" — was born in Hawthorne, California (although Who's Who says Los Angeles), the son of Michael and Dorothy (Ortiz) Gioia. He grew up in Hawthorne, "speaking Italian in a Mexican neighborhood," he said. His father was the son of immigrants from Sicily and his mother was a native Californian of Mexican and Indian heritage. He grew up amid a jumble of languages: English, Italian, Spanish, and the Latin of the Catholic church.

Related Topics:
Hawthorne, California - Who's Who - Los Angeles - Sicily - Californian - Mexican - Catholic

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He received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1973, an M.A. from Harvard University in 1975, and an M.B.A. from Stanford in 1977. After college, he joined General Foods Corporation and served as vice-president of marketing from 1977 to 1992, when he quit to write full-time. But even when at General Foods, he was writing, producing several books of poetry and winning the Frederick Bock Award for poetry in 1986. Gioia is classed as one of the "New Formalists", who write in traditional forms and have declared that this return to rhyme and more fixed metres is the new avant-garde.

Related Topics:
B.A. - Stanford University - 1973 - M.A. - Harvard University - 1975 - M.B.A. - 1977 - General Foods Corporation - 1992 - Frederick Bock Award - 1986 - New Formalist - Rhyme - Metre - Avant-garde

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From 1971 to 1973 Gioia was editor of Sequoia Magazine and its poetry editor from 1975 to 1977. From 1977 to 1979, he was literary editor of Inquiry Magazine and its poetry editor from 1979 to 1983.

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1971 - 1973 - 1975 - 1977 - 1979 - 1983

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