Maria Mazziotti Gillan is Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY. The university has created an exhibit about Maria at the Bartle Library on campus to honor her work, her influence, and to draw attention to the Gillan Archive held in Special Collections.
The University and Faculty Archives include faculty papers and books including those of professor and poet Maria Gillan. Much of the material in Special Collections can be located through the Library search tool and are available via the Special Collections webpage and ArchivesSpace.
This exhibit highlights Maria Gillan’s poetry and visual art as well as her cultural work and influence both in and out of academia. This exhibit was also designed to bolster awareness of the Maria Mazziotti Gillan Archive housed in Binghamton University Libraries Special Collections.
The exhibit was put together by Kiel M. Gregory, a graduate student at Binghamton University and a Special Projects Coordinator.
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| Kiel M. Gregory at the exhibit |
Kiel said he was inspired by the "enormous generosity and guidance in the craft of poetry that Maria has shown me over the years."
"The exhibit is a way for me to use the resources and opportunities available to me at Binghamton University to repay and show reverence to a woman and a poet who has given so much to the world of literature. I hope viewers spend some time enjoying the curation of Gillan’s poetry displayed alongside the books from which they were excerpted. I also hope viewers are inspired to visit the library’s Special Collections department to view the Gillan Archive or any of the other archives and selections made available by the knowledgeable, helpful staff in Special Collections. Additionally, I incorporated a QR code that visitors can scan to submit their own poetry to the Paterson Literary Review, which is a literary journal edited by Maria and published by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, which she founded.While this project was of my own design and labor, I did speak with Maria before I started work. My initial idea was to create an exhibit of Laura Boss’ poetry, as Laura had passed away just before I was accepted for graduate studies at Binghamton University. After some thought, I believed it would have been more appropriate to create an exhibit centered around Maria’s work, due to her standing as Professor Emerita and her strong connection to the university. Visitors of the exhibit will find, however, that I included a photograph of Maria and Laura, together, during one of their first reading tours in Italy."
Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new 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 which pairs her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist's website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.
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