Maria Mazziotti Gillan - poet and artist

May 25, 2026

Jim Reese: Virtual Poetry Reading and Workshop May 30

Jim Reese is an associate professor of English and director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty University in Yankton, South Dakota. He spent fourteen years in residency for the National Endowment for the Arts’ interagency initiative with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where he established Yankton Federal Prison Camp’s first creative writing and publishing workshop. He is the author of eight books, including the nonfiction collection Bone Chalk, and has received several awards for his writing and public service.

On Saturday, May 30, 2026, Reese will conduct a virtual workshop followed by a reading as part of the Poetry Center at PCCC's Distinguished Poets Series. The workshop via Zoom will run from 1 PM – 2:30 PM (EST) and be followed by the poet’s reading from 2:30 PM – 3 PM (ET). Registration is required for all workshops with a fee of $20. Please check registration availability by emailing Cynthia Pagan at the Poetry Center.

Poetry Center readings are always free and open to the public. Poetry Center readings are recorded and archived later for viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.

Link to the live and later archived reading on the Poetry Center YouTube Channel

The Poetry Center offers poetry writing workshops in-person and virtually in conjunction with the Distinguished Poets Reading Series. Over the years, distinguished poets have included poet laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, Inaugural poets and others of national and international reputation, such as Allen Ginsberg, William Stafford, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Stanley Kunitz, Billy Collins, Marge Piercy, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Kim Addonizio, Billy Collins, Dorianne Laux, Jan Beatty, Robert Sward, Patricia Smith, Martín Espada, Toi Derricotte and Richard Blanco.

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.

May 23, 2026

June 6 Leah Umansky Virtual Poetry Workshop and Reading

On Saturday, June 6, 2026, poet Leah Umansky will conduct a virtual workshop followed by a reading as part of the Poetry Center at PCCC's Distinguished Poets Series. Virtual workshops via Zoom will run from 1 PM – 2:30 PM (ET), followed by the poet’s reading from 2:30 PM – 3 PM (ET).

Registration is required for all workshops with a fee of $20. Please check registration availability by emailing Cynthia Pagan at the Poetry Center.

Poetry Center readings are always free and open to the public and are recorded and archived later for viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.

Leah Umansky is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, OF TYRANT (Word Works Books 2024.) She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the STAY BRAVE Substack, which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work has been featured on PBS and The Slowdown podcast, and in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Nation, Poetry magazine, Bennington Review, and American Poetry Review.

Leah is an educator and writing coach who has taught workshops for all ages at venues such as The New York Public Library, The Guggenheim, Poets House, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and elsewhere. Her fourth collection of poems, ORDINARY SPLENDOR, is about wonder, joy, and love. She can be found at leahumansky.com

May 18, 2026

Poem: The Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did

Dante Di Stefano. writing for the Italian American Studies Association, published "Frail and Ferocious as a Sparrow: The Poetry of Maria Mazziotti Gillan." In that essay, he says: "Why are we so much more than we appear to be?” This sentence implies the solidarity created by living in a world where none of us can answer the poet’s question.

He looks at Gillan's poem, "The Most Dangerous Thing I Ever Did,” from Ancestors’ Song, which he feels responds to this question particularly well.

"Ancestors’ Song is perhaps Mazziotti Gillan’s finest collection, and this particular poem exemplifies the poet’s project of dramatizing the remembering self. The poem follows roughly the narrative arc described in “Growing Up Italian,” as Gillan charts her journey from ignorance through knowledge of difference, to self-hatred culminating in the desire to blend in, and ending in the realization of the beauty and of the permanence of the Italian-American identity she sought to erase. The poem reads:

At Eastside High School, most of the Jewish

girls had their noses done, all of us wanting to erase

any hint of ethnicity or race. I envied those girls, so bright

and competent, those girls who could afford to change

their noses into proper American noses and not the ethnic

noses we were born wearing. As soon as I started to work

after college, I paid for a Master’s degree and when I got

my first college teaching job, I decided I was going to have my

nose done. I made an appointment with a plastic surgeon, told

him what I wanted, and he told me what day to report

to the hospital and I signed myself in. I was terrified that

my parents would find out and kill me, but I went through

with it anyway. On the operating table, I heard the doctor say,

“We’re going to give her a perfect nose,” and then, I swear, I heard

him break the bone in my nose. When I woke up I had bandages

over my nose and two enormous black eyes. I was in the hospital

two days and then I called home and told my mother

that I had fallen on the road and hit the curb in the college town,

where the conference was held and where I had never been.

As with all lies, my story was perhaps a little too elaborate.

I think my mother guessed, but my father would have killed me,

so she didn’t tell him anything. Instead, she nursed me back

to health, bringing me chicken soup, toast and tea. When my cousin

came to visit, she said, “Oh, your nose looks the same to me.” I knew

she was saying it to make me feel that my hooked nose had not changed

at all, but I was happy to be rid of it, to have become American

or so I thought. Years later, I am ashamed of my willingness to erase

that nose, so large and unmistakable, for this ordinary, inoffensive

nose, this American nose, my hooked nose, always there

on the inside, always Italian, always mine.

DiStefano continues: "Why are we so much more than we appear to be? The poem answers that we are much more than we appear to be because we are underwritten with cultural legacies that are as indelible as the ghost of Gillan’s hooked Italian nose. This poem enacts the breathlessness of remembering through the torrent of conjunctions it employs. The rhetorical device of polysyndeton magnifies the overwhelming rush of memory in the lines: 'I was in the hospital / two days and then I called home and told my mother / that I had fallen on the road and hit the curb in the college town, / where the conference was held and where I had never been.'

The poem’s resolution is once again contingent upon Gillan’s confrontation with shame and her rejection of the melting pot as a viable symbol in her narrative of the American experience. In this poem, the hooked nose she surgically erased is the true American nose. Significantly, the poet becomes American by remaining Italian, as the poem underscores in its concluding moment by praising: “this American nose, my hooked nose, always there/ on the inside, always Italian, always mine.”

May 16, 2026

Poet Jim Reese Virtual Poetry Workshop and Reading May 30

On Saturday, May 30, 2026, poet Jim Reese will conduct a virtual workshop followed by a reading as part of the Poetry Center at PCCC's Distinguished Poets Series.

The workshop via Zoom will run from 1 PM – 2:30 PM (EST) and be followed by the poet’s reading from 2:30 PM – 3 PM (ET).

Poetry Center readings are always free and open to the public. Registration is required for all workshops with a fee of $20. You can check registration availability by emailing Cynthia Pagan at the Poetry Center.

Poetry Center readings are recorded and archived later for viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.

Link to the live and archived reading youtube.com/live/

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.