More on: Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia—poet, critic, and arts leader—has sometimes said, “I’m the only person who ever went to Stanford Business School to become a poet.” A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, he studied at Stanford (BA, MBA) and Harvard universities (MA), worked as VP of marketing for General Foods, and has published four poetry collections…

WHEN DANA GIOIA’S ESSAY “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991, it galvanized a national conversation about the state of American literature and how creative writing was being taught, produced, and consumed by the reading public. That piece justly propelled Gioia to the front ranks of American letters, not only as a critic but as…