Before returning to Stanford to earn an M.B.A., he completed an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard University where he studied with the poets Robert Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1977 he moved to New York to begin a career in business. For fifteen years Gioia worked as a businessman, eventually becoming a Vice President of General Foods. In 1992 he left business to become a full-time writer.

Gioia is the author of Interrogations at Noon (Graywolf, 2001), winner of the American Book Award; The Gods of Winter (1991); and Daily Horoscope (1986). His critical collection, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf, 1992), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in Criticism. He has also written an opera libretto, Nosferatu, translated Eugenio Montale's Mottetti, co-edited two anthologies of Italian poetry and, with X.J. Kennedy, four of the nation's best-selling college literature textbooks. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Slate, and The Hudson Review. He is also a long time literary commentator on American culture and literature for BBC Radio.

Gioia has co-founded two major literary conferences. In 1995 he helped create the West Chester University summer conference on Form and Narrative, which is now the largest annual poetry-writing conference in the U.S. In 2001 he began "Teaching Poetry," a conference in Santa Rosa, California, dedicated to improving high school teaching of poetry. He has also taught as a visiting writer at Colorado College, Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Mercer, and Wesleyan University. Gioia is currently serving as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

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