Live interviews with Maria

Interviews conducted by Liana Voia of Contemplative, Expressive and Imaginative Arts (our apologies that the previous links didn't work).

 Video 1

Video 2

Good press for PLR on newpages.com

Paterson Literary Review, Issue 40, 2012-2013

A review by Kenneth Nichols

The Paterson Literary Review only arrives once a year, but leaves a lasting impression.

This Passaic County Community College-based journal boasts 400 pages of poems, stories and essays and could easily keep you occupied during several intercontinental flights.

In her editor’s note, Maria Mazziotti Gillan declares one of her primary motivations for selecting work from the 10,000 submissions the PLR receives each year: “I attempt to be inclusive of the work of writers from many races and ethnicities, choosing what I believe to be the best works.”…

[Read full review]

Writing Poetry To Save Your Life: How To Find The Courage To Tell Your Stories

Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest book is about the writing process rather than about the craft of writing. It can be used in classrooms, by writer's groups, or by an individual while writing at home or in a coffee shop. This book will encourage you to write, and in the process, will give you confidence, help you overcome writer's block, and silence the critical voice of the being Gillan calls "The Crow." It will jumpstart your creativity, giving you permission to use the power of words to save your life.

When I first started to consider putting together a book about writing poetry, I thought about how frightened people often are by the idea of poetry - writing it, reading it, feeling that they have anything to write about that anyone else would be interested in reading.

I realized that my whole life as a poet and teacher was dedicated to giving people a feeling that their lives, that what they have to say, is important. I believe we all have stories to tell, and that those stories are the basis for writing poems that reach across the barriers of age, ethnicity, gender, social class to connect with all that is human inside us.

I think of William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he said:

Writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

Writing Poetry To Save Your Life: How To Find The Courage To Tell Your Stories (Guernica Editions - MiroLand Imprint, 2013) combines Gillan's personal story about her journey as a writer with her suggestions for writers at all stages of development.

The voice in this book is the voice of a friend who sits with you in a warm kitchen sipping espresso or a cup of herbal tea, while offering support and encouragement. It is designed to help you find the stories you have to tell and the words to tell them. It is based on the belief that when you find the courage to explore your memories, you will find the source for evocative writing.

About the Author
Maria Mazziotti Gillan 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 the Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published fifteen books of poetry. Her latest collection is The Place We Call Home.

She is the editor of the Paterson Literary Review. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The New York Times, Paddlefish, Connecticut River Review, Poetry Ireland, Connecticut Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Christian Science Monitor, LIPS, and Rattle, as well as in numerous other journals and anthologies.

Maria has won the 2008 Sheila Motton Award, Primo Nazionale Belmoro, the First Annual John Fante and Pietro di Donato Award, the Aniello Lauri Award, the May Sarton Award, the Fearing Houghton Award, New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, and the American Literary Translators Association Award through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also received the New Jersey Governor's Award for Literary Achievement.

Live Interviews with Maria!

These recent interviews with Maria, which can be seen at Contemplative, Expressive and Imaginative Arts, are part of an arts/therapy series and were conducted by Liana Voia, Ph.D.

Poetry in the Park Series

MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN

Poetry in the Park Series

Monday, April 8, 2013

Historic Hopkins House in Cooper River Park
250 S. Park Drive, Haddon Township, NJ
7:30 PM
Free

Open reading to follow
Contact: Brother Daoud Bey 856-227-7200 x 4063 Arts4TeensFestival@yahoo.com

Dorianne Laux and Finalists for the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize To Read

On Saturday, April 6, a reading by winners and finalists for the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize will be given as part of The Distinguished Poets Series of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College.


This free reading is at the Hamilton Club Building, 32 Church St., Paterson, NJ at 1 PM.

First Prize

DORIANNE LAUX

The Book of Men

(W. W. Norton & Company)

Finalists

WANDA COLEMAN
The World Falls Away
(University of Pittsburgh Press)

MARTÍN ESPADA
The Trouble Ball
(W. W. Norton & Company)

RACHEL RICHARDSON
Copperhead
(Carnegie Mellon University Press)

JASON SCHOSSLER
Mud Cakes
(Bona Fide Books)

JOE WILKINS
Killing the Murnion Dogs

(Black Lawrence Press)

Poetry in the Country

Sunday, April 28

LAURA BOSS

MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN

CavanKerry - Poetry in the Country

4 Mountain Rd., Tewksbury, NJ

2 PM 

Free

Contact: Sondra Gash  sondraregine1@comcast.net

Maria Gillan to Read at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival will be held May 3-5, 2013 in Salem, Massachusetts.

Headlining poets will  include: Sharon Olds, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, Nick Flynn, Jill McDonough, Erica Funkhouser and Kevin Goodan.

Gillan Joins The Big Book Drive

Writers love books. And writers love to give people books when possible. So, it is no surprise that poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan is part of a  book-donation campaign by the Paterson library system and The Record and Herald News, along with the Ridgewood and Fair Lawn public libraries, to collect books for Paterson children to take home.

Besides her love of books, Gillan has a deep love for her hometown of Paterson and was one of those kids who grew up making frequent trips to the library because books were a luxury to own.

Maria went to the Riverside library branch on Madison Avenue when she was 7 and says that “Books saved my life.”

One of her treasured childhood books was a copy of Peter Rabbit that was a gift from an aunt when she was bedridden with rheumatic fever at age 9.

"I read that book about 900 times.” More than 60 years later, the impact of that book and others still touches the daily life of this professor and director of the creative writing program at Binghamton University in New York and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson.

The Riverside branch that Maria used was shut down along with three branches in 1995, but the donated books will be distributed to children and families at the grand opening of a new Paterson library branch in April. The Northside library branch was destroyed during Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011.

Appropriately, Gillan's latest book is the non-fiction Writing Poetry To Save Your Life: How To Find The Courage To Tell Your Stories, which will be released in April.

Maria Gillan is joined by other North Jersey writers in the Big Book Drive including best-selling mystery writer Harlan Coben and Ann Napolitano. Coben's latest novel is Six Years, just released this month. Napolitano's latest novel is A Good Hard Look: A Novel of Flannery O'Connor.

MORE: www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/books/