Gioia, Dana: - Dana Gioia is an internationally recognized poet, critic, and former Poet Laureate of California. He is the author of five collections of verse, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), which was awarded the Poets' Prize. His critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, and The Catholic Writer Today and Other Essays (2019whose title essay started an international debate about the role of faith in contemporary literature. Gioia has also written four opera libretti and edited over twenty anthologies. For six years he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Gioia has been awarded 11 honorary doctorates. He has also received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame, Aiken-Taylor Award in Modern Poetry, and Presidential Citizens Medal. For nine years he was the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he hosted the first Catholic Literary Imagination conference in 2015