Where did NEA chairman Dana Gioia get his education? Business school. “Gioia’s self-description has always been more voluminous than the Poet-Businessman shorthand. He is, he says, Latin (of Italian and Mexican lineage), Catholic, and a Californian with working-class roots. He came from East Los Angeles, born in 1950 to a taxi driver father and a telephone operator mother. His youth was spent crisscrossing Los Angeles, in search of new music, and art, and anything else that caught his imagination. He studied the piano, and Latin, and availed himself of the book and record collection left by an uncle killed in a plane crash.”