Dana Gioia reads from "Pity the Beautiful"

Start: 06/01/2012 7:00 pm

Poet and former head of the National Endowment for the Arts Dana Gioia reads from his long-awaited fourth collection of poetry.

Pity the Beautiful is Dana Gioia’s first new poetry book in over a decade. Its emotional revelations and careful construction are hard won, inventive, and resilient. These new poems show Gioia’s craftsmanship at its finest, its most mature, as they make music, crack wise, remember the dead, and in a long, central poem even tell ghost stories.

A reception in honor of Dana Gioia, sponsored by his good friends David Fraher and Rebecca Biderman, will follow the reading.

Dana Gioia is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently serves as the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. Gioia's creation of a series of NEA National Initiatives combined with a wider distribution of direct grants to reach previously underserved communities making the agency truly national in scope. Through programs such as Shakespeare in American Communities, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, NEA Jazz Masters, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, the Arts Endowment has successfully reached millions of Americans in all corners of the country. He lives in Washington, DC.

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