Gioia, Dana

views updated

Gioia, Dana

Career
Sidelights
Selected Writings
Sources

Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and poet

B orn Michael Dana Gioia, December 24, 1950, in Hawthorne, CA; son of Michael (a cab driver and owner of a shoe store) and Dorothy (a telephone operator; maiden name, Ortiz) Gioia; married Mary Hiecke, February 23, 1980; children: Michael (deceased), Theodore, Michael Frederick. Education: Stanford University, B.A. (with high honors), 1973; Harvard University, M.A., 1975; Stanford University, M.B.A., 1977.

Addresses: Office—National Endowment for the Arts, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20506.

Career

P oet, essayist, editor, translator, and arts administrator. Began as assistant product manager for Country Time lemonade, General Foods, 1977; group product manager for Kool-Aid, General Foods, after 1983; Corporate Development group, General Foods, after 1985; published first book of poetry, Daily Horoscope, 1986; vice president, General Foods, 1990-92; appointed to chair the National Endowment for the Arts, 2003, reappointed, 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, San Francisco Magazine and Poetry.

Awards: Frederick Bock Award, Poetry magazine, 1985; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, for Interrogations at Noon, 2002.

Sidelights

I t seems improbable that the marketing executive who created JellO Jigglers would go on to head the federal agency that funds arts and cultural programs in the United States, but Dana Gioia’s career has indeed included both of these roles. Before President George W. Bush appointed him to chair the National Endowment for theArts (NEA) in 2002, the California native was also a published poet, critic, and essayist. Contrary to what some of the NEA’s most vocal critics assert, its programs “are not elitist undertakings,” Gioia told Peggy McGlone of the Newark Star-Ledger. “The arts are ways in which people develop and realize the fullness of their own humanity. If you take the arts away from an educational system, or a community, you have left that community impoverished.”

Born on December 24, 1950, in Hawthorne, California, in southern Los Angeles county, Gioia is the son of a Sicilian Italian father who drove a taxicab and owned a shoe store, and a Mexican-American mother who worked for years as a telephone operator. Many members of Gioia’s extended family lived in their neighborhood, and the first paid job that he held was as a helper for his uncles’ con struction business. Devoted to music, he considered a future career as a composer while a student at Serra High School in Gardena, but chose to major in English at Stanford University with a goal toward becoming a writer who taught at the college level.

Perhaps because of his multicultural heritage, Gioia seemed to pick up languages easily, and spent one of his college years in Vienna, Austria, where he became fluent in German. He graduated from Stanford in 1973—the first person in his family to earn a college degree—and went on to Harvard University, which granted him a master’s degree in comparative literature in 1975. By this point he realized he would likely be unhappy in academia, especially as a poet, for nearly all of the college English departments favored a certain kind of non-rhyming verse, and the twinned worlds of teaching and publishing had become clubby, safe havens. “It’s bad as a society if you have all your poets at a university,” Gioia explained to BusinessWeek writer Nanette Byrnes. “There should be a broader life experience open to writers. I was being taught a professional language that was spoken by about 600, 700 people in the world.”

Gioia considered another career path, this one modeled after the late American poet Wallace Stevens, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1955 but had spent the previous decades as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut. Returning to Stanford to earn a graduate business degree in 1977, Gioia then took a job with the General Foods Corporation in suburban New York City. He worked on the Country Time lemonade, Kool-Aid, and JellO teams, and often put in long hours. Despite the demands of his job, Gioia forced himself to spend at least three hours nightly either reading or writing. His first published work was a limited edition— about 70 copies were printed—fine press book titled Two Poems, which appeared in 1982 from the short-lived Bowery Press.

In 1990, Gioia was made a vice president at General Foods, but left the corporate world two years later. Some of his decision to leave was spurred by a family tragedy, when the four-month-old son he had with his wife Mary, a fellow Stanford business grad, died of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). He also found some unexpected success with a May 1991 essay in Atlantic Monthly magazine titled “Can Poetry Matter?” In it, Gioia criticized the insular world of professional poetry, and urged several remedies that could return poetry to a place of relevance for ordinary Americans, he argued. High-school and undergraduate-level students should emphasize recitation, not analysis, for one. “Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed,” he wrote in the article. “The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem.”

Gioia moved back to California with his family in 1996 and continued to write and publish. In 2002, President Bush named him to succeed the late Michael Hammond, who had died after just a week on the job as chairperson of the NEA. The federal arts-funding agency had a troubled legacy in the latter part of its four-decade history. Created in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program, the NEA was regularly targeted by some Republicans in Congress as a waste of taxpayer money. The lawmakers often used examples of NEA-funded art or cultural programs that might be likely to anger religious conservatives to drum up outrage. By the time Gioia took over, the NEA’s annual budget had dropped from $176 million in 1992 to just $98 million.

Under Gioia’s leadership, the NEAhas implemented several new initiatives that seem to have escaped criticism. There was the 2003 “Shakespeare in America” tour in which four works by the playwright were staged in a pair of communities in each of the 50 states. A program that brought opera performances to U.S. military bases was another success, and Gioia scored somewhat of a personal triumph with Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation competition. In 2006, President Bush reap-pointed him to another term as NEA, a decision confirmed by unanimous vote in the Senate.

By then Gioia had personally met with most of the Senate and the House. For meetings with the latter lawmakers, he brought with him a list of high schools in their district that used educational materials purchased with NEA grants in order to illustrate what kind of work his agency does. In a 2007 interview with New York Times journalist Patricia R. Olsen, he likened his NEA job to the period of his corporate career when he managed the Jello-O brand and came up with JellO Jigglers after months of trying out various recipes the company had collected over the years. “I had all the men on the team make them with me. We figured if we could make them, anyone could . My job at the National Endowment for the Arts is oddly similar: to understand how to take all the agency’s resources and, in addition to everything else we’re doing, come up with a few ideas that are transformative.”