Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia is the Poet Laureate of California. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016). His three critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Gioia has written three opera libretti and edited twenty literary anthologies. He served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009. He holds the Judge Widney Chair of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.