Creative Writers, don’t forget that we’re attending the Dana Gioia reading at Booksmith tomorrow evening, 7:30. This will count as reading credit, so just remember to do your submissions and bring them in for Heather.

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.

Dana Gioia is the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Now back in Calfornia, he lives in Sonoma Country and currently serves as the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.

Gioia has published four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.

Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest now involves nearly half a million high school students across the country in a national poetry recitation contest that awards $50,000 in scholarships.