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, and then spent the first fifteen years of his professional life working for General Foods Corporation where he eventually became a vice president. After his 1991 Atlantic essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" 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. From January 29, 2003, until January 22, 2009, Gioia was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. government's arts agency. In August 2011, Gioia became Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. He currently divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California. 

December 24th, 1950 in Hawthorne (Age 73)