Maria Mazziotti Gillan won the American Book Award for her book All That Lies Between Us(Guernica Editions) in 2008. She is the Founder and the Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ. She is also the Director of the Creative Writing Program and a Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-State University of New York. She has published eleven books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), and Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica Editions). She is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers). She is the editor of the Paterson Literary Review. Her latest book What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 published by Guernica Editions in May, 2010.
Ms. Gillan has read her work at colleges, universities, poetry centers, and festivals throughout the USA including Harvard University, University of California at Santa Barbara, Longfellow House, Cambridge, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Wesleyan University, Georgetown University, San Francisco State University Poetry Center, University of California at San Diego, Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota, among many others. She has also read at poetry festivals internationally in Yugoslavia, Sicily, Italy, France, Malta, Wales, and Finland. She was named Connecticut State Touring Poet in 2009.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble
Writers for Writers Award. She will be presented with this award-
along with John Grisham, Elizabeth Nunez, and recipient of the Editor’s Award,
Jonathan Galassi--at a Poets & Writers’ benefit dinner on March 2nd, 2011.
The Writers for Writers Award was established by Poets & Writers in 1996 to recognize authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. Past recipients of the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award include: Edward Albee, Judy Blume, Mary Higgins Clark, E.L. Doctorow, Junot Díaz, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston, Wally Lamb, Walter Mosley, Susan Sontag, and Amy Tan. The Editor’s Award was established in 2009, and has been awarded to Daniel Halpern and Pat Strachan.
