Online Poetry Intensive with Maria Gillan and Laura Boss

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Laura Boss have held their weekend poetry retreats for many years, but have had to cancel their weekend intensive for September 2020. Laura and Maria have decided to host a four-hour poetry intensive using the popular online tool Zoom.

This program will take place Saturday, August 1 from 10 AM till 2 PM. Laura and Maria will conduct this session as they do when they live workshops at the retreat house in Mendham. They will each take half the group and then switch groups so that everybody gets a chance to work with both poets and will use the same writing prompts.

The fee for this Zoom workshop is $40. If you’re interested, please make sure you e-mail Smita Desai at sdesai@pccc.edu and fill out the form linked below and send it with a check payable to Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and mail it to 40 Post Avenue, Hawthorne NJ 07506.

Download registration form and details

Laura Boss is a first-place winner of PSA’s Gordon Barber Poetry Contest. Founder and editor of Lips, she is the recipient of three NJSCA Poetry Fellowships, and in June 2011 received the first International Poetry Award at the International Poetry Festival in Swansea, Wales. Her books include: Reports from the Front (CCC), Arms: New and Selected Poems and Flashlight (both Guernica). She co-edited with John Gallaher, Time Is a Toy:  Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt (University of Akron, 2014).  Her most recent book of poems is The Last Lover (NYQ, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The New York Times. Visit her website: laurabosspoet.wordpress.com

 

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the winner of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP, the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us. She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, editor of the Paterson Literary Review, and starting September 2018, has been appointed a Bartle Professor at Binghamton University—SUNY and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing. She has published 23 books, including What Blooms in Winter (NYQ Books, 2016) and Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (Cat in the Sun Books, 2014). Visit her website at www.mariagillan.com

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Munro, Birch and Gillan Live Online

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

As American as Apple Pie and Spotted Dick: Stories Celebrating Our Feisty Mums

Join Oracle Award recipients, Carol Birch and Jennifer Munro, along with American Book Award recipient, poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan who invite you to pour a cuppa and enjoy a glimpse of lives seasoned with humor and love.

Save the Date: July 12, 2020 at 4pm  

Please register by emailing jennie@jennifermunro.net 

Within 24 hours, you will be sent a Zoom link and access to a PayPal button.
The suggested ticket price is $5 to $15.

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's most recent books are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collection, What Blooms in Winter. Her collection of poems paired with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets.
Her artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan in Conversation on Poetry

Maria Gillan recently had a long-distance conversation with Shelly Bhoil who is an Indian scholar and poet, currently living in Brazil.

They discussed a variety of topics, including:

1. The role of poetry in times of pandemic

2. Metaphors in poetry - with reference to 'cave' and 'crow' which she often uses with her students telling them that all poems are hidden in a cave, which is guarded by a crow. 

3. Esoteric poems versus poems with an inner electricity

4. How important are form and meter to poetry?

5. Utility and limitations of creative writing courses

6. Poetry’s relationship with pen/paper versus keyboard/screen

And Maria offered 2 poetry prompts for the current times of pandemic: Why are you so afraid to be alone? What makes you feel safe at home?

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is an artist, poet and professor. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. Maria is a Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing and is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published 22 books of and about poetry and four literature anthologies. 

Shelly Bhoil is an Indian scholar and poet, living in Brazil. Her publications include An Ember from Her Pyre (Writers Workshop, India, 2016), (co-editor) Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage (Lexington Books, US, 2018), Preposição de entendimento (Urutau, Brazil, forthcoming), and (editor) New Narratives of Exile Tibet (Lexington Books, forthcoming). She is Editor-at-Large for Tibet at Asymptote.

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's most recent books are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collection, What Blooms in Winter. Her collection of poems paired with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets. Her artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

New Jersey Is the Poetry State

New Jersey is nicknamed the Garden State but for Maria Gillan and many others it is also the Poetry State. 

In this video from stateoftheartsnj.com you hear New Jersey poet natives Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Joe Weil, BJ Ward, and three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky. They all acknowledge their NJ predecessors such as Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, and Walt Whitman.

A group of Jersey poets shared the stage at “Jersey Voices” – part of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival programming at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. 

Maria talks about the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in historic Paterson which she has directed for over 35 years. Like the Dodge Poetry Festival, it’s a beloved hub of the poetry world rooted in New Jersey.

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's most recent books are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collection, What Blooms in Winter. Her collection of poems paired with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets. Her artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

The Things I Didn't Know to Wish For by Linda Hillringhouse

"The poems in Linda Hillringhouse's new collection, The Things I Didn't Know to Wish For, are beautifully polished and glow like jewels. Most importantly, these poems are so brave and bold they will blow the top of your head off. No matter how many times I read this book, I am moved to tears and laughter. These poems make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and that is my ultimate test for great poetry." - Maria Mazziotti Gillan 

Photo by Mark Hillringhouse

Linda Hillringhouse holds an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry. She was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award (2014) and the second-place winner of Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry (2012), which was judged by 2011-2012 United States Poet Laureate Philip Levine. She has received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Lips; New Ohio Review; Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry; Oberon Poetry Magazine; Prairie Schooner; The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere. 

Hillringhouse is a self-taught painter who has shown her work at the Newark Museum; Paterson Museum; the Yale School of Art, among other venues. Her work is included in the Hamilton Club Art Collection, Paterson, NJ. She was selected for inclusion in the 20th Century Self-Taught Artists Archive Collection at The Museum of American Folk Art in New York City.

In Linda's new poetry collection, The Things I Didn't Know to Wish For, (NYQ Books), she follows May Sarton's dictate to "dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be." 

The first poem of the book, "New Dress," serves as the origin story for the poems that follow. The young girl of the poem is confronted with a truth that will govern her life. It is the devastating fallout from this truth that drives many of the poems in this collection. Hillringhouse comes out from behind her language to face what must be faced if she is to make meaning of her life. And it is in the dangerous beating heart of her poems where she finds meaning and even glimpses of salvation. 

"Linda Hillringhouse's poems are lovely to read and beautifully crafted, at times bitter, ironic and unforgiving, as well as honest and original. She is a truth-sayer and she refuses to compromise, and the poems are emblazoned with this refusal. Whether she is being critical of the culture she grew up in, or tenderly remembers the love and friendship, the voice is the same, and more than anything else, she is seized by the sheer mystery that underlies and permeates her reality. A good way to begin is with the very last poem, "Nieves Penitentes," an example of the broken world she writes so much about. Start there, or start with "...I couldn't stop wondering how it would feel to be that / at home in the universe" in "The Royal Mineral Water Hospital, Bath." Or just start at the beginning and read through, with great delight, as I did."  -  Gerald Stern

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's most recent books are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collection, What Blooms in Winter. Her collection of poems paired with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets. Her artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.