Dana Gioia reads from "Pity the Beautiful"

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.