33 Facts About Dana Gioia

Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.

Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the highly controversial and countercultural literary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advocates the telling of non-autobiographical stories.

Dana Gioia has argued in favor of a return to the past tradition of poetry translators replicating the rhythm and verse structure of the original poem.

Dana Gioia helped renew the popularity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the rediscovery of Weldon Kees and John Allan Wyeth.

Dana Gioia co-founded the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference, which has run annually since 1995.

At the request of US President George W Bush, Gioia served between 2003 and 2009 as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Five years after Dana Gioia left office, The Washington Post referred to him as one of "two of the NEA's strongest leaders".

In December 2015, Dana Gioia became the California State Poet Laureate.

Dana Gioia has published six books of poetry and five volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, song cycles, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies.

Dana Gioia's poetry has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and several other anthologies.

Dana Gioia's poetry has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, and Arabic.

Dana Gioia published translations of poets such as Eugenio Montale and Seneca the Younger.

Dana Gioia was born in Los Angeles in 1950, the child of a working-class Sicilian father and Mexican-American mother.

Dana Gioia became the first person in his family to attend college.

The reason, Dana Gioia explained, was that between 1940s and the 1960s, when college and university faculty positions were routinely offered to famous poets, American poetry had become imprisoned in college and university creative writing programs.

Dana Gioia alleged that, to say that a living poet was well-known, meant merely that he or she was well known to other poets, who were generally professors and graduate students.

Dana Gioia further wrote that poetry was no longer a fruit of Literary Bohemia, but of academic bureaucracy.

In 1992, Dana Gioia resigned from his position as a vice president at General Foods to pursue a full-time career as a poet.

In 2002, Gioia was nominated as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts by US President George W Bush.

Dana Gioia served as chairman from 2003 to 2009, and worked to bring new visibility to the agency through a series of national initiatives that stressed broad democratic reach and artistic excellence.

In 2006, Dana Gioia created Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest for students.

Dana Gioia re-energized the NEA Jazz Masters, which is the nation's highest honor in jazz music, in order to raise the visibility of artists who he felt were undervalued in their own country.

Dana Gioia expanded his "Shakespeare in American Communities" program to include tours to military bases.

In 2004, Dana Gioia launched Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which collected writings from US troops and their families about their wartime experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and stateside.

Dana Gioia stepped down from the NEA in January 2009 to return to poetry.

Five years after Dana Gioia left office, The Washington Post referred to him as one of "two of the NEA's strongest leaders".

Dana Gioia has been a visiting professor for a single term at Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, Mercer University, and Colorado College.

In 2015 Dana Gioia was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown as the Poet Laureate of California.

Dana Gioia's travels became the subject of a BBC Radio 3 documentary.

Dana Gioia's poem "Planting a Sequoia" is based on his experience of losing his infant son.

Dana Gioia has published six full-length volumes of poetry in addition to many smaller fine-press books and pamphlets.

Rather than present his poems chronologically, Dana Gioia arranged them by seven themes.

Dana Gioia has collaborated with musicians including James MacMillan, Ned Rorem, Lori Laitman, Morten Lauridsen, Paul Salerni, Alva Henderson, David Conte, Tom Cipullo, Stefania de Kenessey, and John Harbison.