Maria Mazziotti Gillan - poet and artist

February 17, 2026

Poetry Reading February 21 with Nicole Santalucia

On Saturday, February 21, 2026, poet Nicole Santalucia will conduct a virtual workshop followed by a reading as part of the Poetry Center at PCCC's Distinguished Poets Series.

Workshops 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.

Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). Her work has appeared in publications such as Colorado Review, Palette Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Sonora Review, Fourteen Hills, The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, The Normal School, Out Magazine and elsewhere.

She is a Professor of English, the Director of First-Year Writing, co-chair of the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council, and serves on the steering committee of the Institute for Social Inclusion at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

link for live and archived video https://youtube.com/live/CHwyRtrjmt8?feature=share

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.

February 12, 2026

Poem: What Do I Know About Grief

What Do I Know About Grief

What do I know about grief

or how Death would follow me
like a determined lover,

taking first my mother, father, sister,

my best friend of forty-two years?

Then my husband.

How his bony finger
would point at the next person.

Once, I walked into a spider web

and I think grief is like that —

it catches in your hair and your lashes.

My friend’s husband died after a short and brutal illness.

They were as close as two spoons.
When he died, she told me she had always been happy

just to be in their apartment with him,

that even passing him in the hallway felt like an act of love.

In the weeks after my husband died,

in the months waterlogged with tears,

I thought I would not survive, but gradually

I began to imagine that he came back to visit me.

A shadow in the corner of the room,

a presence sitting in a chair beside me,

though, of course, he could never stay long.

I am comforted by his ghost self.

I am sure he is telling me that he is content

in that other world where I cannot touch him.

I am grateful there is a door

through which he can pass to visit me,

even for a moment, his ghost hand on my cheek.

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

January 21, 2026

Maria Gillan Judges the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize 2025

Congratulations to Jeff Walt for earning the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize 2025, and to Steve McDonald and Pat Owen for earning second and third places. The 2025 entries were judged by Maria Mazziotti Gillan.

The award ceremony will be held April 21, 2026t atop of the San Diego Public Library, downtown.

For information see The Steve Kowit Poetry Prize – San Diego Poetry Annual

January 14, 2026

Poem: Everything We Don’t Want Them to Know

Everything We Don’t Want Them to Know

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

At eleven, my granddaughter looks like my daughter

did, that slender body, that thin face, the grace

with which she moves. When she visits, she sits

with my daughter; they have hot chocolate together

and talk. The way my granddaughter moves her hands,

the concentration with which she does everything,

knocks me back to the time when I sat with my daughter

at this table and we talked and I watched the grace

with which she moved her hands, the delicate way

she lifted the heavy hair back behind her ear.

My daughter is grown now, married

in a fairy-tale wedding, divorced, something inside

her broken, healing slowly. I look at my granddaughter

and I want to save her, as I was not able

to save my daughter. Nothing is that simple,

all our plans, carefully made, thrown into a cracked

pile by the way love betrays us.

“Everything We Don’t Want Them to Know” by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, from What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009, appeared on The Writer’s Almanac in 2015 and was also possted in January 2026 on the new The Writer's Almanac on Substack.