Maria Mazziotti Gillan: Stories About Her Mother

Joe and Paula McHugh are a husband and wife team who believe strongly in the power of stories and their American Stories website is a celebration of American family stories  

They asked Maria Mazziotti Gillan to contribute two stories to their pandemic story-a-day mini-project.

Maria's stories are about her Italian-born mother and Maria's childhood in Paterson, New Jersey where she still works as the director of the Poetry Center at PCCC. 

Joe McHugh also knows Paterson because it is the city where he did most of his growing up. Paterson was and continues to be a community of immigrants - a place people come to hoping to improve their lives in this experiment we call America.

Listen to Maria's stories: about her mother's "E.S.P" and her mother wanting to go back to school, self-learning, her granddaughter's yearbook and America

 

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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.

Poem: Cheap

"Cheap" first appeared in the Winter 209 issue of Prairie Schooner

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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.

Online Poetry Intensive with Maria Gillan and Laura Boss

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

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.