Maria Gillan on the Early Days of the Poetry Center at PCCC

Hamilton Club Building

From an interview with Maria conducted at the Poetry Center at PCCC in Paterson, NJ.

"I started the Poetry Center in bits and pieces. As I started doing some readings there, I would say "Can you give me a room at the college?" I thought that because I was an adjunct instructor, the college might do it as a favor. Luckily, they did.

Although I couldn’t pay an honorarium, I invited friends to read. Soon, I was officially setting up a reading series. I followed that with a poetry contest and an anthology of the winning poets’ poems. 

I worked to create a regular literary magazine. At that time, it was called Footwork, but I later I changed the name to the Paterson Literary Review. 

After a couple of years, I decided I would apply for a New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant to get some money to fund some of the programs that I was doing. In 1980, I got the first grant for the Poetry Center, and I was able to use that to pay for some contest prizes and modest honorariums for poets. With that, The Poetry Center at PCCC was officially born. 

Poetry Center entrance

Since then, I’ve added a lot of different aspects to the Center. Along the way, the New Jersey Council on the Arts has always been very helpful in funding our new programs. Of course, I could not have run them without the financial support of Passaic County Community College, which allowed me to formalize the Center into a Cultural Affairs Department, expand its programs, hire more staff and find us more space. We became housed in the beautiful and historic Hamilton Club building on campus. Steve Rose, the college president, and various administrators have shown invaluable support for what my department tries to bring to Paterson and Passaic County. Many people benefit from our programs, and we have had a number of people who have donated money or left us money in their wills."

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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.