Michael Dana Gioia (/ˈdʒɔɪ.ə/; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist. Gioia was born into a working class family of Mexican and Sicilian descent and grew up attending Roman Catholic parochial schools in Hawthorne and Gardena, California. After becoming the first member of his family to attend college, Gioia graduated from both Stanford University and Harvard University. He spent the first fifteen years of his literary career writing at night while working as a senior executive for General Foods in New York City. Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the literary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advo