Michael Dana Gioia (; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the controversial and countercultural literary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advocates the telling of non-autobiographical stories. At the request of U.S. President George W. Bush, Gioia served between 2003 and 2009 as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In November 2006, Business Week magazine profiled Gioia as "The Man Who Saved the NEA". Five years after Gioia left office, The Washington Post referred to him as one of "two of the NEA's strongest leaders".
In December 2015, Gioia became the California State Poet Laureate. Gioia has published six books of poetry and five volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, song cycles, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies. Gioia's poetry has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Gioia published translations of poets Eugenio Montale and Seneca the Younger.
Gioia was born in Los Angeles in 1950, the child of a working-class Sicilian father, who drove a taxi, and a Mexican-American mother, who worked as a telephone operator. He attended Catholic schools for twelve years, graduating from Serra High School in Gardena, California. In high school, he dreamt of becoming a music composer.
Gioia attended Stanford University, the first person in his family to attend college. He received a BA from Stanford. followed by an M.A. in comparative literature from Harvard University, where he studied with the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. He then returned to Stanford where he received an MBA.
For fifteen years, Gioia worked as a businessman in New York while writing at night and on weekends. Among his jobs was serving as a vice president at General Foods, where he marketed Kool Aid. In 1992, he left the corporate world to pursue a writing career.
In 2002, Gioia was nominated as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts by U.S. President George W. Bush. With support from both Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, Gioia gained a $20.1 million increase in his agency's budget and for the remainder of his tenure, silenced requests from conservative Republicans to abolish the NEA. In November 2006, Business Week magazine profiled Gioia as "The Man Who Saved the NEA". While Chair, Gioia created several national initiatives each around a specific art. "We have a generation of Americans growing up who have never been to the theater, the symphony, opera, dance, who have never heard fine jazz, and who increasingly don't read," said Gioia. The New York Times columnist William Safire referred to Gioia's NEA national initiatives as "A Gioia to Behold". His program "Shakespeare in American Communities" gave grants to more than 40 American theatre companies to tour small and medium-sized communities. His program The Big Read aimed to increase literacy across America. It was launched as a pilot program with ten communities in 2006, and went national in 2007, eventually becoming the largest literary program in the history of the federal government.
In 2006, Gioia created Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest for students. Gioia expanded his "Shakespeare in American Communities" program to include tours to military bases. The NEA also sent young artist programs from opera companies around the country to military bases with the Great American Voices Military Base Tour.
Gioia stepped down from the NEA in January 2009 to return to poetry. Five years after Gioia left office, The Washington Post referred to him as one of "two of the NEA's strongest leaders".
Gioia has been a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan, Mercer University, and Colorado College. For nine years he taught literature and music at the University of Southern California as the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture. He quit in 2019.
In 2015, Gioia was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown as the Poet Laureate of California. During his four years in office, Gioia became the first state laureate to visit all 58 counties in California. Focusing on small and mid-sized communities, he participated in over 100 events with local writers and students. His travels became the subject of a BBC Radio 3 documentary.
Gioia has published six full-length volumes of poetry in addition to many smaller fine-press books and pamphlets. Although Gioia is best known for helping revive rhyme and meter, all of his books contain a mix of poems in free and formal verse. His first collection, Daily Horoscope (1986), attracted much notice, favorable and unfavorably, because of its use of rhyme, meter and verse narrative, but its most widely reprinted poem, “California Hills in August,” is in free verse.
The Gods of Winter (1991), Gioia’s second collection, contains poems written after the death of his first son. Published in the U.S. and U.K, the British edition was chosen by the Poetry Book Society as their main selection.
Gioia’s third collection, Interrogations at Noon (2001), was the winner of the 2002 American Book Award. The book contains both original poems and translations. Pity the Beautiful (2012) marked Gioia’s return to poetry after his time and the NEA and included two chilling poems, “Special Treatments Ward,” which describes a terminal ward in a children’s hospital, and “Haunted,” a dramatic monologue in equal parts of a love story and a ghost story. “Haunted” was turned into a ballet-opera by composer Paul Salerni.
Gioia’s next volume, 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), surveys his career in an unusual way. Rather than present his poems chronologically, Gioia arranges them by seven themes. The book won the Poets’ Prize. Gioia's most recent collection of poems is Meet Me at the Lighthouse, published in 2023. It pays special attention to his Mexican roots and includes “The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz,” which recounts the life and death of this great-grandfather, a vaquero who was killed in a racially motivated incident.
Criticism and beliefs about poetry
In a 2016 interview, Gioia recalled, "As soon as I began publishing formal poems, my work was attacked." In response, he decided, "to articulate my poetics", by publishing literary essays.
Gioia wrote the 1983 essay Business and Poetry, in which he pointed out how many other well-known figures in American poetry, including Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, had also made their livings outside of the academy. In his 1987 essay Notes on the New Formalism, Gioia wrote: "There will always be groups advocating new types of poetry, some of it genuine, just as there will always be conservative opposing forces trying to maintain the conventional methods. But the revival of rhyme and meter among some young poets creates an unprecedented situation in American poetry. The New Formalists put the free-verse poets in the ironic and unprepared position of being the status quo. Free verse, the creation of an older literary revolution, is now the long-established, ruling orthodoxy, formal poetry the unexpected challenge... Obviously, for many writers the discussion between formal and free-verse has become an encoded political debate."