Poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia has been published in, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Book Review. He is a frequent BBC Radio commentator on American culture and literature. Before becoming a full-time writer, he was vice president of marketing for General Foods. He earned his M.A. in comparative literature from Harvard University, and his M.B.A. and B.A. from Stanford University.
 Trained in music, Gioia has been the classical music critic for San Francisco magazine for the past six years. His work has been set to music by many composers in genres from classical to rock, including a full-length dance theater piece, "Counting the Children." He has written the libretto for Nosferatu, an opera, with composer Alva Henderson, which was published by Graywolf in 2001.
Gioia is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, German and Romanian. In 2001 he founded "Teaching Poetry," a conference dedicated to improving high school teaching of poetry. He is the founder and co-director of the West Chester University summer conference of Form and Narrative, the nation's largest annual all-poetry writing conference. Along with being vice president of the Poetry Society of America and serving on the boards of numerous arts organizations, Gioia has taught as a visiting writer at several universities, including Johns Hopkins University and Wesleyan University.
In early 2002, Gioia was selected as a winner of the 23rd annual American Book Awards for his third collection of poetry, Interrogations at Noon (Graywolf Press, 2001). Gioia read from that collection on Volume 51 of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, and was featured discussing the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Volume 53 of the Journal.
Gioia's poetry has been praised in the American Book Review by Matthew Brennan for "keeping the lyric impulse alive and well."
The American Book Awards, established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation, recognize the literary achievement of contemporary American authors and acknowledge "literary excellence without limitations or restrictions." With no fixed categories and no slate of nominees, winners are drawn from well-known to under-recognized writers. There are no application forms or fees, nor any other restrictions, for submissions for the Awards. Submissions are judged by the Board of Directors of the Before Columbus Foundation, which is composed of writers, editors, and publishers.
Gioia first gained national attention in 1991 when the Atlantic Monthly published his provocative essay "Can Poetry Matter?" The article, which argued for a place for poetry in "American public culture," garnered more letters of response than any article the magazine had published in decades. Many of the letters replied negatively to Gioia's thesis: while poetry had become increasingly important over the last few decades among academics and specialists, he wrote, it had decreased in importance and accessibility for the general public. After tracing the migration of poetry and poets from Greenwich Village to the Ivory Tower, Gioia offered several proposals for returning the art to the public. These included using radio to expand the art's audience, and mixing poetry with other arts at public readings. "Can Poetry Matter?" has been re-issued in the tenth-anniversary edition of the book by the same name, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf Press, 2002).
 On the bonus track for Volume 53, Dana Gioia talks about the life and work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), and reads a poem inspired by the death of his wife, "The Cross of Snow." Click here to listen to the segment. (Left click to stream; right click to save.)
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Dana Gioia, on the disturbing trends in the reading (non)habits of Americans (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-090.2.1
Dana Gioia, on the decline in literary reading in America and on the cultural loss it signifies (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-070.2.3
Dana Gioia, on the craft, popularity, and significance of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-053.1.2
Dana Gioia, on the place of poetry and the way words work (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-051.2.2
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