MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University, where she teaches poetry. She is the founder and the Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently All That Lies Between Us (Guernica, 2007); poems from this volume and from her previous volume Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica, 2002), have been featured on Garrison Keillor's NPR program The Writers' Almanac.

Gillan's other books of poetry include The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), Where I Come From and Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica). She is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer Gillan of three anthologies published by Penguin/Putnam: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic In America and is the editor of The Patterson Literary Review. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland, The New York Times, Connecticut Review, and Rattle, among many other journals and anthologies. She has won the Fearing Houghton Award (2001), the May Sarton Award from the Poetry Club of New England, the American Literary Translator's Award, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship for the Virginia Center for the Arts, and two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Poetry.

LINKS:

A sampling from her books.

Poems.

More poems.

A sample of her work:

Donna Laura

Donna Laura, they called my grandmother
when they saw her sitting in the doorway, sewing
delicate tablecloths and linens, hours of sewing
bent over the cloth, an occupation for a lady,

Donna Laura, with her big house falling
to ruins around her head,
Donna Laura, whose husband
left for Argentina when she was 24,
left her with seven children and no money

and her life in that southern Italian village
where the old ladies watched her
from their windows. She could not have
taken a breath without everyone knowing
,
Donna Laura who each day sucked
on the bitter seed
of her husband's failure
to send money and to remember
her long auburn hair,

Donna Laura who relied on the kindness
of the priest's "housekeeper"
to provide food for her family.
Everyone in the village knew

my grandmother's fine needlework
could not support seven children,
but everyone pretended not to see.
Even when she was 90, Donna Laura
still lived in that mountain house.

Was her heart a bitter raisin,
her anger so deep it could have cut
a road through the mountain?
I touch the tablecloth she made,

the delicate scrollwork,
try to reach back to Donna Laura,
feel her life shaping itself into laced patterns
and scalloped edges from all those years between
her young womanhood and old age.

Only this cloth remains,
old and perfect still, turning her bitterness into art
to teach her daughters and grand-daughters
how to spin sorrow into gold.