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Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet and writer who also served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in Hawthorne, California to working class parents of Italian and Mexican descent, Gioia attended Harvard and Stanford Universities. For fifteen years, he worked for General Foods Corporation while writing at night and on the weekends. His 1991 Atlantic essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" generated international attention. In 1992, he quit his job to write full-time.
Gioia has published four books of poetry and three volumes of poetry criticism as well as opera libretti, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies. His third poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon won the 2002 American Book Award. Gioia's poems have been reprinted in numerous anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He has been the subject of two critical monographs, numerous essays, and a book-length bibliography.
From January 29, 2003, until January 22, 2009, he was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. government's arts agency, and has worked to revitalize an organization that had suffered bitter controversies about the nature of grants to artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gioia, the first poet to chair the NEA, created a series of national arts initiatives, including Poetry Out Loud, Shakespeare in American Communities, and the Big Read, as well as programs that supported jazz, dance, visual arts, and international cultural exchanges. In August 2011, Gioia became Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California.
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