Polymathic Pizza event with Dick Davis

Dick Davis is widely considered the finest living translator of Persian literature into English. Davis’s translations include Attar’s The Conference of the Birds (with Afkham Darbandi), a book of medieval epigrams (Borrowed Ware), Pezeshkzad’s My Uncle Napoleon, Ferdowsi’sShahnameh, Gorgani’s Vis and Ramin and, most recently, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Born in England, Davis lived in Iran from 1970 to 1978. A poet as well as a translator, Davis is the author of At Home and Far from Home: Poems on Iran and Persian Culture, among other books. He was a professor of Persian and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University from 2002 until 2012.

Dana Gioia holds the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. Professor Gioia is the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. A true polymath, Professor Gioia has also written an opera.