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Sunday, May 11 |
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet, will deliver the Commencement Address to the Beloit College class of 2008 on May 11, 2008. The Commencement ceremonies will take place on the lawn in front of historic Middle College at 11 a.m. More than 300 hundred students will receive their degrees at that time.
A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, Gioia earned a bachelor’s and Master of Business Administration degrees from Stanford University and a master’s degree in comparative literature from Harvard University.
He has published three full-length collections of poetry, and his collection Interrogations at Noon won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic, his 1991 book Can Poetry Matter? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.
Now in his second term heading the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is the former vice president of the Poetry Society of America and has served on the boards of numerous arts organizations. In 2001, he founded Teaching Poetry, a conference dedicated to improving high school teaching of poetry. He is also the founder and co-director of the West Chester University Poetry Conference, the nation’s largest annual all-poetry writing conference. His anthology, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry and Drama, co-edited with X.J.H. Kennedy, is the best-selling college literary textbook in America.
The Beloit College Commencement ceremonies are open to the public.