The National Endowment for the Arts Confirms Dana Gioia as Chairman

Afterimage, March-April, 2003

The National Endowment for the Arts Confirms Dana Gioia as Chairman. The ninth Chairman of the NEA was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on January 29. Gioia is best known as a poet, critic, educator and former Vice President of Marketing for General Foods. Trained in music, Gioia has been the classical music critic for San Francisco magazine for the past six years and has had a number of his literary works set to music.

His collection of poems, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. His poems, translations, essays and reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Book World and The Hudson Review, among others. He has translated poetry from Latin, Italian, German and Romanian and founded "Teaching Poetry" in 2001 as a conference dedicated to improving high school teaching of poetry. Upon his confirmation, Gioia stated, "Leading the National Endowment for the Arts is a great privilege and an enormous responsibility. Both the arts and arts education face many challenges at pre sent and the Endowment has much to do."...