Delays Flights Disturbances Delights: Maria Mazziotti Gillan, artist, poet, professor

Tireless, dedicated, unselfish and generous are just some of the words that come to mind when I think about Maria Mazziotti Gillan. My wife Angela and I had the privilege of meeting and speaking at length with Maria afer hearing her give a reading in Cambridge at the house of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. https://www.nps.gov/long/index.htm

A year or so later, I joined about twenty other apsiring writers to work with her for a couple of days at a writer's retreat in Morristown, New Jersey.

It was a thrill for me to give my late mother signed and inscribed copies of Maria's books, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women In Black Dresses. My mother read both of them with zeal, tears and much enjoyment. Like Maria, she had been raised as the daughter of hard-working first generation Italian immigrants, and had dealt with all of the trials that entailed. When my mother died, I made a point of finding those two books and passing them along to my sister.

Here is a link to Maria's website: https://www.mariamazziottigillan.com/

What follows comes directly from Maria's biography online:

My art comes from an instinctive place. In my watercolors and collages I try to do what I do in poetry—that is to let go, to allow the old wise woman who lives in my belly to take over. Often, when I’m writing a poem, it is as though the poem is writing itself, operating out of the subconscious mind after the first few lines. I don’t allow my conscious mind to control what is going on in the poem. For me, the same thing happens when I am painting or constructing a collage. Allowing my imagination to take over, gives me the freedom to paint people, interiors, or the external world as they exist in my mind rather than in reality.

In my poetry, I try to root my work in the details and specificity of ordinary life, but in my art, I am not attempting to achieve realistic portrayals of people, interiors, or birds, or flowers. Rather, I am trying to capture energy and feeling. I am trying to allow the essence of the subject to come forth, to convey joy or sadness, exuberance or loss.

She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, and is the founding editor of the Paterson Literary Review.

Maria Gillan is a Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY.

Maria has published more than 20 books of and about poetry and four literature anthologies.

A collection of her poems along with a selection of her paintings was published as The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets. Her most recent poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Her poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse is Paterson Light and Shadow.

She is the 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).

Maria has read her poems numerous times at universities, festivals, and poetry centers throughout the USA and in Italy, France, Yugoslavia, Finland, Wales, and Ireland.