- POETRY
Daily Horoscope
(Graywolf, 1986)
The Gods of Winter
(Graywolf, 1991)
TRANSLATION
Mottetti: Poems of Love
by Eugenio Montale
(Graywolf, 1990)
The Madness of Hercules
by Seneca
(Johns Hopkins, 1995)
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- CRITICAL COLLECTIONS
Can Poetry Matter?:Essays on Poetry and American Culture
(Graywolf, 1992)
The Barrier of a Common Language: Essays on Contemporary British
Poetry
(U. Mich., forthcoming)
ANTHOLOGIES EDITED
Poems from Italy
with William Jay Smith
(New Rivers Press, 1985)
New Italian Poets
with Michael Palma
(Story Line Press, 1991)
An Introduction to Poetry
with X.J. Kennedy
(Longman, 1998)
An Introduction to Fiction
with X.J. Kennedy
(Longman, 1999)
Literature: An Introduction to Fi ction, Poetry and Drama
with X.J. Kennedy
(7th Ed., Longman, 1999)
OTHER EDITIONS
The Ceremony and Other Stories
by Weldon Kees
(Abbatoir Editions, 1983)
The Ceremony and Other Stories
by Weldon Kees
expanded edition
(Graywolf, 1984)
Formal Introductions:
An Investigative Anthology
(Aralia, 1994)
Certain Solitudes: Essays on the Poetry of Donald Justice
(U. Ark., 1997)
Manuscripts:
New York Public Library Berg Collection
Critical Studies:
"The Poet in the Gray Flannel Suit" by Bruce Bawer, in
Connoisseur (New York) March 1989; "Reading the New
Formalists" by Robert McPhillips, in Poetry After Modernism,
edited by Robert McDowell, Brownsville, Oregon, Story Line Press,
1991; "Dana Gioia and the New Formalism" by Peter
Russell, in The Edge City Review #2 (Reston, Virginia,) 1994.
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Dana Gioia was born in Los
Angeles in 1950. He received a B.A. from Stanford University. Before
returning to Stanford to earn an M.B.A., he completed an M.A. in
Comparative Literature at Harvard University where he studied with the
poets Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1977 he moved to New
York to begin a career in business. For fifteen years Gioia worked as a
businessman, eventually becoming a Vice President of General Foods. In
1992 he left business to become a full-time writer.
Dana Gioia’s poems,
translations, essarys, and reviews have appeared in many magazines
including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book
World, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Slate, and The
Hudson Review. He is also a frequent literary commentator on
American culture and literature for BBC Radio.
Gioia’s controversial first book
of poems, Daily Horoscope (Graywolf Press, 1986), was not only
praised and attacked in literary periodicals but also widely discussed
in publications as diverse as The Village Voice, Newsweek, Forbes, and
Connoisseur. It eventually became the subject of a vociferous
three-issue debate in Northwest
Review.
Gioia’s second collection of
poems, The Gods of Winter, was published simultaneously in both
the U.S. (Graywolf) and Great Britain (Peterloo) in 1991. In the U.K. it
was chosen by London’s Poetry Society Book Club as their main
selection, an honor rarely given to American authors.
In 1991, The Atlantic
published Gioia’s essay, "Can Poetry Matter?", which ignited
a national debate on the role of poetry in contemporary intellectual
life. The Atlantic received more responses on this essay than on
any piece in recent history. Meanwhile articles discussing "Can
Poetry Matter?" appeared in journals ranging from The Times
Literary Supplement and The New Criterion to USA Today
and Washington Post Book World. Gioia’s article was also the
subject of special programs on the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Company,
and National Public Radio.
Gioia has published a translation
of the Italian Nobel Prize winning poet Eugenio Montale’s Mottetti (Graywolf,
1990). He also co-edited two large anthologies of Italian poetry, and he
currently co-edits with X.J. Kennedy four of the nation’s best-selling
college literature textbooks.
Gioia’s critical collection, Can
Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf,
1992), was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the "Best
Books of 1992". This volume also became a finalist for the 1992
National Book Critics Award in Criticism.
In 1995 Gioia co-founded the West
Chester University summer conference on Form and Narrative. The
nation’s only writers’ conference focused on the traditional
techniques of poetry, the annual West Chester gathering has become the
largest ongoing all-poetry conference in the U.S. Gioia has also taught
as a visiting professor at Colorado College, Johns Hopkins, Sarah
Lawrence, Mercer, and Wesleyan University.
He is currently writing the
libretto for Nosferatu, an opera, with composer Alva Henderson.
Showcased as a work-in-progress at the 1998 Western Slope Music
Festival, Nosferatu received international acclaim as an
intensely neo-romantic musical drama.
Gioia lives in Sonoma County,
California with his wife and two sons.
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