Jazz may well be considered America's most treasured and most influential export, ... From its earliest days until now it has continued to grow creatively -- yet the people who have given us this art form deserve far greater recognition.
"Michael Dana Gioia" is an American poet and writer who also served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He was born in Hawthorne, California to working class Italian and Mexican parents, attended Stanford and Harvard Universities, and spent the first fifteen years of his career writing at night while working for General Foods Corporation. After his 1991 essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" in the The Atlantic generated international attention, Gioia quit business to pursue writing full-time. Gioia has published four books of poetry and three volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies.
Gioia was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the U.S. government's arts agency from January 29, 2003, until January 22, 2009. In August 2011, Gioia became Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he now teaches. He currently divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.
More Dana Gioia on Wikipedia.It's important that America recognizes its own great artists while they're still alive.
Through Great American Voices, the NEA is building bridges between the military and arts community, ... This tour gives singers a chance to perform for new audiences and brings great music in live performance to military families.
This is no longer as case of 'Johnny can't read,' ... It's Johnny won't read.'
Jazz is one of the great, truly native American art forms. Along with the movies, it's probably the art that the rest of the world associates most deeply with America.
America can no longer take active and engaged literacy for granted.
People have to recognize that the arts are a major industry and need to be at the table for the recovery plan, ... There is no way for these local economies to recover unless we invest in the cultural life. Culture was Louisiana's second-biggest economy, right after oil. These organizations have suffered enormous losses.
Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.
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