DANA GIOIA ’73 G’77
California Poet Laureate and Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. He is the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently 99 Poems: New & Selected. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. In 2014, he won the Aiken-Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in American poetry.
He is also an influential critic. His 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.
He holds a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford University, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Gioia currently serves as the Poet Laureate of California.