Maria Gillan Reading Plus Film Showing in Maywood This Weekend

Saturday, May 3

MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN

reading her poetry,
plus a documentary film, All That Lies Between Us, on the life and work of Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Maywood Public Library

Hackbarth Auditorium

459 Maywood Ave., Maywood

2 PM   Free

Contact: Jenna Lee Columbia   Library: 201-845-2915201-845-2915

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song

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Silence in an Empty House Reviewed in L'Italo-Americano

Maria's poetry collection, The Silence in an Empty House, was reviewed in L'Italo-Americano, a bilingual, weekly newspaper serving the Italian-American community throughout the United States. Established in 1908, this weekly periodical is the oldest Italian-American newspaper in the United States with a mission to promote, and most importantly, preserve Italian culture and heritage by reporting in both Italian and English on subjects such as arts and culture, literature, education, history, business, sciences, sports, lifestyle to name a few.

The articles opens with:

The word that comes to mind when reading Gillan’s two most recent books of poems is prolific. After nineteen books, including the two under review and the co-editor of four anthologies, she has established herself as an unassailable voice in contemporary American poetry. The fifty-eight poems in Silence in an Empty House are an extended elegy to her late husband, Dennis.

To read the full story, you will need to be a digital subscriber to italoamericano.com

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song

Poets Under 40

The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College has a call for submissions open for an anthology to celebrate the work of regional poets under 40.

Poems can be submitted by those 18 to 39 years of age who live in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Each contributor will receive one copy of the anthology.

A maximum of two poems per person will be considered (only one copy needed). Only unpublished poems.  Include contact information (name, address, phone number, and email) on the top of each poem. Each poem should be no more than two pages, single spaced. Poems will not be returned, so do not send originals.

All poets, whose work is accepted, will be required to read his or her poem from the anthology on November 8, 2014 at 1 p.m. at the historic Hamilton Club Building in downtown Paterson, New Jersey. 

Deadline: June 15, 2014

Notification of accepted poems will be August 2014. Only poets, whose work has been accepted, will be contacted. Those who wish to receive a notification flyer of winners should include SASE.

Please do not call our office in reference to anthology submissions. Questions should be sent by email to sdesai@pccc.edu

Typed submissions should be mailed to:

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Executive Director
Poetry Center
Passaic County Community College
One College Boulevard
Paterson, NJ 07505

Download a pdf of the submission form

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com. Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song .

Poem: Nighties

Nighties

At my bridal shower, someone gave me
a pink see-through nightgown and pink satin
slippers with slender heels and feathers.
The gown had feathers on it, too.

I've always hated my legs and even then,
when I was still thin and in good shape,
I didn't want to wear that nightgown
or slippers, didn't want to parade

in front of you like some pinup.
But I wore them anyway, all those negligees
I got as shower presents, sleazy nylon
I didn't know was tacky. When I wore

sporty nightgowns, I'd leap into bed
not wanting you to notice how
the nightgown revealed what I thought
my biggest flaw. In all the young years

of our marriage, I wore a different nightgown
every night, not that it stayed on for long,
and afterward I'd pull it back on, not wanting
our children to see me naked in our bed.

I felt so sophisticated in those nightgowns,
like the ones Doris Day wore in movies.
Only years later, when my daughter buys me
a nightgown made of soft and smooth blue silk,

do I realize that the first ones I owned
were imitations of this one
I hold now to my cheek, grateful
to have been once so young,

to have loved you in nylon and silk
and in my own incredible skin.

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com. Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song .

An Interview With Maria Gillan

Maria Mazziotti Gillan sat down this month for an interview with Micah Towery on TheThepoetry.com

Here are two excerpts:

Maria on what she admires in poets

One of the things I see in Allen Ginsberg’s work is his willingness to fight his own demons—his mother’s madness, his own fears, accusations against him for this poem Howl. He talks about that in the film Howl. He said he had to learn about everything. He ends up saying that everything is holy. If you are willing to go to all the places that maybe you’re ashamed of, and really look at them, you can make them blessed, you can raise them up, you can give courage to others just as Allen did. Literature provides window in someone else’s life and give us the connection between the writer and the reader. It forms a bridge between reader and writer. In writing narrative poetry, I think we learn about our own humanity. The writers I admire are ones who are afraid but go ahead anyway — Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Joe Weil, Jan Beatty, to name just a few of the great writers creating memorable work today.

Maria as an editor

I edit a journal [Paterson Literary Review], and have done so for 33 years. I am the only editor and I choose poems and stories and memoir based on my ideas about writing. I’ve organized a reading series for 33 years also, and again I choose the poets who are capable of reaching people of all types and classes. I am not interested in work that uses language as a screen and I don’t feature that kind of poet. I think my audience likes my poetic taste and they return month after month, year after year, to celebrate poetry that is rooted to the ground, poetry that celebrates ordinary life. I think that there is resurgence of narrative poetry because in this mechanistic world , people need and want meaning. I think of Shakespeare whose plays have survived because he wrote for both the elite and the people in the pit. I think that’s why we are still drawn to his plays even today so many years since they were written and performed.

read the full interview at www.thethepoetry.com along with a featured poem by Maria.

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com

Gillan Praised for AWP Award

Binghamton University English Prof. Maria Mazziotti Gillan received the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Gillan, who has promoted literature for nearly 35 years, is also the founder and director of the Binghamton Center for Writers and the director of the creative writing program.

She has published 18 books and co-edited four anthologies with her daughter, Jennifer. Gillan is also the founder/executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and the editor of the Paterson Literary Review.

In her acceptance speech, Gillan thanked those teachers “who read poetry aloud in English in those dusty classrooms at PS18 in Paterson, NJ, those teachers who first introduced me to the music of the language and made me love literature.”

SOURCE: www.pressconnects.com

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song

Call for Submissions for Poets under Forty Anthology

The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College is pleased to announce a call for poems for an anthology to celebrate the work of regional poets under 40.

All poets, whose work is accepted, will be required to read his or her poem from the anthology on November 8, 2014 at 1 p.m. at the historic Hamilton Club Building in downtown Paterson, New Jersey.

Poems can be submitted by those 18 to 39 years of age who live in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Each contributor will receive one copy of the anthology.

A maximum of two poems per person will be considered (only one copy needed). Only unpublished poems.  Include contact information (name, address, phone number, and email) on the top of each poem. Each poem should be no more than two pages, single spaced. Poems will not be returned, so do not send originals.

Deadline: June 15, 2014

Notification of accepted poems: August 2014. Only poets, whose work has been accepted, will be contacted. Those who wish to receive a notification flyer of winners should include SASE.

Please do not call our office in reference to anthology submissions. Questions should be sent by email to sdesai@pccc.edu

Typed submissions should be mailed to:

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Executive Director
Poetry Center
Passaic County Community College
One College Boulevard
Paterson, NJ 07505

Download a pdf of the submission form

Maria Gillan and Laura Boss Featured at Fanwood Reading

The Carriage House Poetry Series is in its 16th year at the Kuran Arts Center, an historic Gothic Revival structure that was once a 19th century carriage house. The Carriage House Poetry Series invites the public to attend a poetry reading by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Laura Boss on Tuesday, April 15.

The free performance will begin promptly at 8 p.m.. in the Kuran Arts Center on Watson Road, off North Martine Avenue, adjacent to Fanwood Borough Hall. (GPS use 75 N. Martine Avenue). An open mic reading will follow the featured performance.

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 /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 Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.

She has published 18 books, and her most recent are Ancestors' Song (Bordighera Press), The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books) and Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica).

Woodbridge native Laura Boss is a first prize winner in the Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Poetry Contest and a recipient of three fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has read at many venues in Europe and the United States, including the Dylan Thomas Centre in Wales, the International Struga Poetry Readings in Yugoslavia, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the United Nations, Princeton University and the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Boss is a long-time Dodge Poet-in-the-Schools and the author of several books of poetry, including “Arms: New and Selected Poems” (1999) and her newest, “Flashlight” (Guernica Editions). As a visiting artist and mentor to young poets, she has been a familiar figure on the Northeast poetry scene for decades. Boss has been on National Public Radio and her poems have been in the New York Times and other noted publications. Founder of LIPS magazine in 1981, she continues to edit and publish the biannual poetry journal.

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com. Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song .

Maria Gillan Reading in Hawthorne Today

Maria Mazziotti Gillan will be reading tonight, April 11, for the Friends of the Louis Bay 2nd Library at 345 Lafayette Ave. in Hawthorne, NJ.

The reading is at 7pm and is free and open to the public. An open reading will follow.

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com. Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song .

Great Falls Anthology Reading Will Be May 10

May 10, 2014 at 1 PM

A free poetry reading by the contributors to the
Great Falls Anthology

at the Hamilton Club Building,32 Church Street, Paterson, NJ

The Distinguished Poets Series of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College

This new anthology celebrates the Great Falls, the Passaic River and environmental issues with poetry rooted in the literary tradition that honors place, narrative, clarity and specificity.

READERS

MARTÍN ESPADA (spotlight poem)

SUSAN LEMBO BALIK

SVEA BARRET

RAYMOND BARTO

PATRICIA ANN BENDER

HOWARD BERELSON

TARA BETTS

LAURA BOSS

GRACE CAVALIERI

LINDA CRONIN

DANTE DISTEFANO

R.G. EVANS

ANDREW FADER

DEBORAH GERRISH

GAIL FISHMAN GERWIN

MARIA GILLAN

ELISA GORDON

JAMES D. GWYN

WILLIAM HARRY HARDING

MARK HILLRINGHOUSE

LINDA HILLRINGHOUSE

CHARLES JOHNSON

FRANCES LOMBARDI-GRAHL

BRUCE LOWRY

NANCY LUBARSKY

JOHN MARCHITTI

ELIZABETH MARCHITTI

WAYNE L. MILLER

FRANK NICCOLETTI

MAUDE CAROLAN PYCH

JOSEPH RATHGEBER

CAROLE RITTENBERG

KENNETH RONKOWITZ

KATHERINE SANTANGELO

KENNETH SILVESTRI

MADELINE TIGER

EMILY R VOGEL

BOB WARD

JOE WEIL

BARBARA R. WILLIAMS-HUBBARD

SANDER ZULAUF

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Not Done With Her Changes: A Review of Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s The Silence in an Empty House
by Joe Weil on www.thethepoetry.com

All griefs are as unprecedented, as original as the whorls in our fingerprints, and yet certain poets are able to take the specific ceremonies of grief and loss and reenact them in such a way that they are meaningful to all who read their work. This portability is something the poet Pessoa mentioned when he wrote: “The personal is not the human. To become the human it must make a bridge.” This bridge is the contrivance of the right ceremony, the necessary words that will release the energy of true feeling and allow that tentative thread to be touched and felt by the reader. Maria Mazziotti’s new collection, The Silence in an Empty House, does just that...

No book of Gillan’s builds finer more lasting bridges. This is the culmination of her life’s work, even more so than her collected, and it proves that even reaching beyond the age of 70, and losing almost the whole of her leading list of life players—parents, sister, beloved spouse–Maria Mazziotti Gillan is still not done with her changes. This book is essential reading for anyone who believes poetry has the power to speak for more and plot for more than just the exhibitionist and voyeuristic self. Moving away from the triumphalism of the determined immigrant’s daughter, this book is a greater triumph and gift for all those who understand her final lines said in the full winter of her life:

How grateful I must
remember to be, to hold
so much in my hands.
so much in my hands.

continue reading

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song

Winner and Finalists of the 2013 Paterson Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2013 Paterson Poetry Prize and Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco (far right), is pictured here
with Maria Mazziotti Gillan and some of the finalists (left to right):  Joseph Millar; Aaron Smith; and Melinda Palacio.
These poets read at the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in downtown Paterson, NJ
this past Saturday, April 5, 2014.  

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song

April 22 Reading In Highland Park with Maria Gillan

Since 2005, the institution’s Friends of the Highland Park Library have sponsored a series of free poetry-related events, including readings by poets, open mic nights and writing workshops.

Among the writers who have participated in these events are members of Cool Women Poets, an informal collective that started in Central Jersey in 1997. The group started the library’s spring 2014 Poetry Night Series with a group reading.

The first ever poetry night at the Highland Park Public Library featured readings by the author Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Maria will return for a third reading scheduled for April 22.

In the past nine years, the Poetry Night Series has attracted writers with international reputations, including Mark Doty, who teaches at Rutgers, and Paul Muldoon, who started the Princeton Poetry Festival. Other participants have been acclaimed writers with ties to New Jersey, such as BJ Ward, Edwin Romond and the members of Cool Women Poets.

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com
Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song

Poem: When We Were Engaged

The Cyclone coaster at Coney Island

When We Were Engaged


We go to Coney Island. You talk me into riding
the rollercoaster. I'm afraid of going fast,
of heights, but you're so handsome and middle class.
I want to impress you, so I let you help me
into the rollercoaster seat, snap the bar into position.
I pretend to be fine until we start down in a great rush
and I grab your arm and shut my eyes and scream so long
I could have been an opera singer holding her highest note.
By the time the coaster stops and you hold my hand
to help me off, I'm giggling in that nervous way
that tells everyone you're glad you're alive and that
five minutes ago you weren't. so sure you'd survive.
I can't look at you, know you know
just how afraid I was. You don't ask
if I want another ride. Instead you suggest
the merry-go-round, and I'm grateful to circle
the ground, the placid, lovely horses going up and down,
and I can pretend to myself that you didn't know
how afraid I was, how much I hated
that last, huge plunge.

© 2014 Maria Mazziotti Gillan from The Silence in an Empty House

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com
Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song

Maria Gillan Reading in Hawthorne April 11

Maria Mazziotti Gillan received the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature at the 2014 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference. She is founder/executive director of the Poetry Center at PCCC, editor of the Paterson Literary Review, and author of 18 books.

Gillan will read from her work on April 11 at 7 pm at the Louis Bay 2nd Library, 345 Lafayette Ave., Hawthorne, NJ. The reading is presented by the Friends of the Library, the event is free. For info, call 973-427-5745973-427-5745.

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Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com and her books are available at Amazon.com. Her latest publication is the poetry collection,  Ancestors' Song .