Maria Mazziotti Gillan - poet and artist

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

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.

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.

December 29, 2025

Jan Beatty Virtual Poetry Workshop and Reading January 10

On Saturday, January 10, 2026, poet Jan Beatty 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.

Jan Beatty has authored eight collections of poetry and a celebrated memoir. Her eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2024. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Other recent books include The Body Wars and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, which won the Paterson Poetry Prize.

Now a full-time academic, she has worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and social worker in maximum-security prisons. Jan Jan Beatty has taught poetry for over twenty-five years at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Carlow University. As a poet, she is known for her raw, unflinching exploration of class, the body, and her Pittsburgh roots.

Her website is janbeatty.com

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

View the reading live or when it is archived

Maria Gillan and Jan Beatty

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.