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"Only silence is shame" - Bartolomeo Vanzetti
Maria Mazziotti Gillan was Visiting Poet in the Graduate School at Binghamton University, the State University of New York in Spring 1999 and at Northern Michigan University in Summer 1999. She is the founder and Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, editor of The Paterson Literary Review and is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer Gillan of the acclaimed anthologies, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Viking/Penguin), Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to be American (Penguin/Putnam), and Growing Up Ethnic In America (Penguin/Putnam). Her work has been widely anthologized and she has won numerous awards, including National Public Radio's The Poet and the Poem Award for Literary Excellence, 1998, the May Sarton Award from the Poetry Club of New England, (1998), Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship, Virginia Center for the Arts, January, 1998, the American Literary Translator's Award (funded through the NEA) for her book Winter Light, (1988), two New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships, 1980 and 1985, and a Chester H Jones Foundation Award, (1989). She was a finalist in the PEN Syndicated Fiction competition (1994). The author of six books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons and the Alta Award winning Luce D'Inverno (Cross Cultural Communications), her most recent are Where I Come From: Selected and New Poems (Guernica), 1995 and Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica, 1999). She has been published in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Poetry Ireland as well as in numerous other journals. She taught at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in the summer of 1997. She has appeared on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Leonard Lopate's "Books and Co.," and Garrison's Keillor's "Writer's Almanac." She is at work on a memoir called My Mother's Stoop. She has taught "Tending the Spring, Clearing the Fountain," Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Workshops for Teachers since 1993. |