Maria Mazziotti Gillan - poet and artist

March 17, 2026

Maria Mazziotti Gillan on Her Poetry Legacy: Part 2

Maria at the Great Fall of Paterson
Photo: Mark Hillringhouse

Maria Mazziotti Gillan was interviewed by Arianne Bakelmun for Visions, the newspaper of Passaic County Community College, just before her retirement as Executive Director of the Poetry Center.
This is a second excerpt from "A Fireside Chat on Legacy: From Immigrant Roots to the Retirement of Maria Mazziotti Gillan."

From her first secretary, who didn’t know the alphabet, to another who refused to sit and would do the entirety of the job standing, Maria reminisces on the humble beginnings of her Poetry Center.

At first, she was afforded just five work-study students in lieu of employees. She speaks lovingly about how it expanded to a crew of employees, including Alin Papazian’s handling the grants, Jane Hall’s work as Art Gallery Coordinator, and Susan Amsterdam’s Theater and Poetry Project.

The Theater and Poetry Project was an entity unto itself, putting on forty theater performances a year. Maria finds meaning in having done this for the children of Paterson.

MMG: I grew up here. [As an adult, returning,] I thought this is no different. It’s worse than when I was here growing up, where there were no extra-curricular activities. There were no field trips, no trips to the theater.

Money limited the options for families in Paterson. So, Maria started the theater program with grants that made its magic accessible.

MMG: [When I was thirteen] I had a cousin who went to school in New York and worked at NBC. And she got tickets for South Pacific and took me for my birthday. And when we got in the theater, they turned the lights down and they turned the lights on the stage. All of a sudden, I thought, there's another life! There's a life that can be made of poetry, words, language, music! There's another life! And so, it really threw open a door. I always told her, you really saved my life when you did that. Because that might not have been important to you, but to me, at 13, it was very important.

,The Theater and Poetry Project lives on though Maria laments at the grants that have been cut, limiting the scope of their productions. In fact, she has some choice words and names names but cautions me with a laugh, “Don’t put that in!”

Maria and consultant Lisa Coll-Nicolaou have built the program back up, and they have now expanded into Jersey City and South Orange with goals of growing it in other counties.

Maria's legacy includes national and international projects including book awards, poetry contests, a magazine, and a YouTube channel. Maria was also at the helm of Paterson Literary Review.

MMG: I wanted it to be elegant. Paterson Literary Review sounds serious. I started the reading series first. I didn't have any money. So I would have my friends read for nothing. Doing me a favor. And then I got a grant from the state council in 1980 for $2,500

From there, she was able to hold contests with prizes and payment. As time went on, the readings included William Stafford, Lucille Clifton, Alan Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.

Maria is used to navigating this ebb and flow with her characteristic perseverance and humor. When she first started out she was sensible about her dreams.

MMG: I knew I could not be a poet unless I found a way to support myself. I wasn't so impractical that I thought I could just walk on a stage in New York City and be accepted. No! I knew I had to find a way to support myself, and I did work for Social Security Administration—boring job—for a year and a half. I was losing my mind. It was the only time in my life that I couldn't write. So I said, “You have to do something. You have to do something about this.” I saw an ad for a teaching job at Caldwell College. I called up, and I went for an interview, and I was so shy, I was so afraid. I mean, I went there, I was shaking, and they hired me! And I had never taught before.

Maria found that old styles of lecturing did not work for her. She arranged her class to sit in a circle to discuss ideas, books, and what struck them as important. The students loved her.

The symbolic circle of desks became a core tenet she repeated, later at SUNY-Binghamton University.

Here, the students wrote, “the most wonderful risk-taking poems. We would be crying. We would have to hand out tissues in class.”

Her inclusivity and making space for all voices remain essential to the Poetry Center to this day.

However, soon after marriage, she felt pressure to have children. She loves her children. Yet, to that pressure, today she would have said, “No, no, no!”

After just getting the grip on teaching, Maria had a hard time leaving her beloved job. Even when her children were babies, she wrote college review books as they napped and was published by Simon & Schuster.

MMG: I never stop. I mean, it's not like I'm ever going to just lie down and say, I'm not doing anything. Because I had a different idea of what I was going to do. It was scary to get back into teaching after being away so long.

Maria credits her mother-in-law with telling her, “You have nothing to be afraid of. You were a wonderful teacher. You'll be a wonderful teacher. Now, go, do what you have to do.”

Maria’s re-entry into teaching began with a high school class, the only time she’s ever hated teaching. So, she picked up jobs as an adjunct professor. At one point, she taught at eight different schools for very little money.

MMG: I would have done it for free to be honest. I really loved to teach. I've been very lucky. I love teaching, and I got to do it. I love writing and creating programs, and I got to do it. I love being a mother and a grandmother, and that's a lovely thing. I've been really, really fortunate. I love going to other countries to read my poetry. I love going to other states to read my poetry. I've been all over the United States and Europe reading my poems.

Read other interviews with Maria

Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

March 14, 2026

Maria Mazziotti Gillan On Her Poetry Legacy: Part 1

Maria at the Poetry Center Photo: Jen Brown

Maria Mazziotti Gillan was interviewed by Arianne Bakelmun for Visions, the newspaper of Passaic County Community College, just before her retirement as Executive Director of the Poetry Center at PCCC. Here is the first of 3 parts from "A Fireside Chat on Legacy: From Immigrant Roots to the Retirement of Maria Mazziotti Gillan."

MMG: [My] first encounter with poetry was in Public School Number 18. In Paterson, where the teachers would read these 19th-century poems. I loved them. I fell in love with the way English poetry sounded. That was something my parents couldn't do because they didn't actually speak English. So they told us stories, but they were in Italian.

Maria wrote her first play when she was nine.

MMG: I'm sure it was terrible. I started writing poems, but then I was still afraid. I was still hiding behind language and trying to prove I was smart. You know, I was afraid people would think I was an idiot immigrant, and nobody would want to listen to me.

She was first published in a Catholic publication called St. Anthony’s Messenger with a poem about a dog wagging its tail.

MMG: Now, I didn't have a dog, I knew absolutely nothing about dogs. It was the lesson of what not to do.

But from there, she began reading a lot of imagist poems, writing a lot of haikus, and all the while imitating and learning for herself. Finally, at fifteen, she got two pages of poetry accepted by an Italian American journal.

MMG: They [called me] the “next great Italian-American poet.” It was such a nice feeling.

Forty or so years later, at her father’s house for dinner, Maria’s father approached her.

MMG: He always had these little treasures he would give me. And he comes with this magazine, and he said, “You remember this?” And he gives it to me. He saved all this stuff. He saved [that] magazine, which I had lost track of 40 years before.

Now, in her forty-sixth year at Paterson’s historic Hamilton Club Poetry Center, where she served as Executive Director, causes her to reflect. “I feel every day in my bones.”

AB (Arianne Bakelmun): Has that amount of years widened or changed your perspective on how you want to organize things?

MMG (Maria Mazziotti Gillan): First, I had to learn to do the job because I had never done a job like this before. I had always taught. I had never done administrative work. I had never done a press release. I had never done a budget. I’d never done a grant report. So I had to learn to do all those things. And there wasn’t anybody to teach me. So I taught myself how to do it. And then after a while…I expanded all the programs that I started [and they] got bigger and bigger, because I have an idea, and then it blossoms into this gigantic thing.

This is a running theme for Maria.

MMG: I’m kind of a genius that way! I always thought of myself as kind of a lower-class, immigrant kid who’s kind of stupid. And I realized as my life has gone on, I’m amazing. Where I come from, I shouldn’t have been able to do anything.

March 12, 2026

Spring Narrative Poetry Workshop With Maria Gillan

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is happy to announce the beginning of a series of Narrative Poetry Workshops: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories, virtually via Zoom.

This workshop series is open to adults 50 and over. The fee is $90 for the entire session, which includes six classes.

Workshops Time: 1 pm – 3 pm (EST)

Spring 2026 Session: Thursdays: March 19, 26, April 2, 16, 30 & May 7

Download and print the registration form

March 10, 2026

Edvige Giunta Virtual Writing Workshop and Reading March 21

This is a reminder that our upcoming Distinguished Poets Series Workshop and Reading with Edvige Giunta is on Saturday, March 21.

The memoir workshop via Zoom will run from 1 PM – 2:30 PM (ET) and be followed by a reading from 2:30 PM – 3 PM. If you plan on attending this Zoom workshop, please RSVP via email to Cynthia Pagan before registering and sending your check, so we can hold your place.

Workshop information and registration form

Edvige Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and coeditor of six anthologies, including The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture and Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, recipient of the 2023 Susan Koppelman Awrad for Best Anthology in Feminist Studies in American and Popular Culture, just published in Italy by Iacobelli as Le ragazze della Triangle. Her memoirs, essays, poems, and interviews appear in anthologies, journals, and magazines. At New Jersey City University, where she is Professor of English, she teaches courses on the memoir and a course on the Triangle fires as well as other literature and writing classes.
Her website is edvigegiunta.com

About Maria Gillan

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions).

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. She is also director of the Binghamton Center for Writers and the creative writing program, and professor of poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.

Maria has published 22 books of and about poetry, and 4 anthologies. Her most recent books are the poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse, Paterson Light and Shadow (Serving House Books, 2017) and the poetry collection, What Blooms in Winter (NYQ, 2016). Her collection of poems along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (Redux Consortium). Other recent publications are Ancestors' Song (Bordighera Press) and Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica). With her daughter Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies.