Originally from Los Angeles, Dana Gioia (b. 1950) is an award-winning poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. After graduating from Harvard University with a master’s in comparative literature (1975) and from the Stanford Business School with a master’s of business administration (1977), Gioia spent 15 years working at General Foods Corporation, where he became vice president of marketing and was instrumental in increasing the sales of Jell-O. During this time, however, he regularly wrote poetry, publishing often in the Hudson Review, Poetry, and the New Yorker. In 1992, following the publication of his poetry collection The Gods of Winter (which won the 1992 Poets’ Prize), he retired from the corporate world to focus on writing full time. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed him as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a position he left in 2009 after serving for two terms. He is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.