American poet (born 1940)
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is an American poet.
Life.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan was born March 12, 1940, in an Italian enclave in Paterson, New Jersey's Riverside neighborhood.
She attended Paterson public schools and is a graduate of Eastside High School.
She graduated from Seton Hall University and from New York University with an MA In literature. She enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Drew University from 1977 to 1980. She married Dennis Gillan; they have two children, John and Jennifer, and two grandchildren, Caroline and Jackson.
She is the founder and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review, and is the director of the creative writing program and professor of poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. Gillan founded Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in 1980, after receiving a grant from the State Council on the Arts, and featured speakers including Allan Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Stanley Kunitz.
She has published 22 books. One of her most recent is "The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets" (Redux Consortium, 2014), a collection of her poetry and watercolor artwork. Her craft book, "Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories" (MiroLand, Guernica) was published in 2013.
She is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers).
Since 2012 she has been in the Honour Committee of Immagine &amp; Poesia, the artistic literary movement founded in Turin, Italy, with the patronage of Aeronwy Thomas (Dylan Thomas's daughter).
She lives in Hawthorne, New Jersey, and is a professor emeritus at SUNY-Binghamton.
Works.
Poetry.
"After School on Ordinary Days"; "Growing Up Italian"; "Daddy, We Called You"; "The Black Bear On My Neighbors Lawn in New Jersey"; "Love Poem to My Husband of Thirty-One Years"; "I Dream of My Grandmother and Great Grandmother"; "Paterson"; "Learning to Love Myself"; "Public School #18"; "Watching the Bridge Collapse"; "How The Dead Return"; "Last Night at the Hampton Inn"; "Sometimes I forget How Fragile the Heart Is"; "On Being Italian"; "Photo of My Sister"; "At Eleven, My Granddaughter Loves to Read"; "The Ghosts in Our Bed"; "Breakfast at the I Hop"; "Your Voice on the Phone Wobbles"; "In Second Grade" "How Do I Pack Up the House of My Life?"; "Couch Buddha"; "Poem to John"; "In My Dream, I see You"; "My Father Always Bought Used Cars"; "My Son Tells Me Not to Wear My Poet's Clothes"
References.
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