Dana has won many awards for his poetry, including the Pushcart Prize XXI in 1996; the Carl Sandburg Medal for Poetry in 1994; and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1985 and 1993.
As writer-in-residence at Hamilton, he will meet with students who forwarded manuscripts prior to his arrival, and visit classes.
He was a professor of English and poet-in-residence at Cornell College from 1954 to 1994, and has been a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Stockholm University, a Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Wichita State University; USIS/Arts America Lecturer, University of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania); Kenyatta University and Nairobi University.
Dana has written numerous books of poetry including: A Community of Writers: Paul Engle & the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1999); Hello Stranger (1996); Yes, Everything (1994); What I Think I Know: New & Selected Poems (1991) and Starting Out for the Difficult World (1987), which was a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 1988.
His poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others.
Dana has served on the Poets Selection Panel, Des Moines National Poetry Festival, as well as the Literary Publishing Panel and the Literature Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a contributing editor to The North American Review and served as contributing editor to The American Poetry Review and New Letters.
Dana earned a bachelor's degree from Drake University; a master's degree from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; and, he was a post-graduate Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.
