Maria Maziotti Gillan, accomplished poet, and committed advocate for poetic activities.
With twenty books published, Maria Mazziotti Gillan is one of our more extensively published featured poets. Her most recent are the poetry and art collection, The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (Redux Consortium). Ancestors' Song (Bordighera Press), Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica) and the bi-lingual poetry collection, In a Place of Flowers & Light (poems in English & Italian with a preface by Elisabetta Marino, edited by Osvaldo Marrocco (San Mauro and Mia Mama).
She is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam), Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American (Penguin) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers).
Maria also does important work for the larger poetry community as the Founder /Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. Each year a number of prestigious poetry contests are sponsored by the Poetry Center. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.
Gillan has received many awards for her poetry and her poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac.” She has been interviewed and read her poems on National Public Radio’s (NPR) “All Things Considered,” “The Brian Lehrer Show,” and “The Poet and the Poem.”
Her winning style at the podium and her highly personal poems make her popular with audiences of all types as a reader and workshop leader. To hear her talk about the importance of growing up Italian-American on her identity and her work, listen here for our special home and family podcast.