Robert Dana was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1929. He served in the South Pacific in World War II as a U.S. Navy radio operator. After the War, he moved from Boston to Des Moines, Iowa, where he attended Drake University and worked as a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register. Later he studied at the University of Iowa and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and received a Masters Degree in 1954. From 1954-1994 he served as Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. [1] In 1964, Dana was responsible for the resumption of the publication of The North American Review, and served as its editor for a number of years.

Dana has published over a dozen collections of his poetry. In addition, Dana's work has appeared in publications such as The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Poetry (magazine), The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and The Sewanee Review.

Dana's poetry has won a number of awards. His poetry collection "Starting Out for the Difficult World" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1989 he was the recipient of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry, given by New York University. He received a Pushcart Prize in 1996, and has been awarded the Rainer Maria Rilke Prize for Poetry. He has also been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1985 and 1993).

In September 2004, Robert Dana was named poet laureate for the the State of Iowa. He has also served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Stockholm University and at several American colleges and universities.[2]

Poetry. "Robert Dana's WHAT I THINK I KNOW is the fruit of a lifetime's quiet dedication to the art of poetry. These rigorously clear and deeply felt poems repay the closest reading. My hope is that this selection-chosen from over three decades of writing-will bring a host of new readers to a poet whose fullness of vision and strangely inward music represent, in fact, the true voice of poetry itself"-Jay Parini. WHAT I THINK I KNOW is a lush and sensual re-evaluation of the world of objects-"Today, everything takes/ the color of the sun. The air/ is filed and fine with it;/ the dead leaves, lumped/ and molten; flattened grass/ taking it like platinum" ("At the Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, D.C.")-validated throughout by a constant incarnation of the divine in the everyday. Dana was born in Boston in 1929, and has lived in Iowa for many years, where he is poet-in-residence at Cornell College.