Maria Mazziotti Gillan was born March 12, 1940 in an Italian enclave in Paterson, New Jersey's Riverside neighborhood. She attended Paterson public schools and is a graduate of Eastside High School. She graduated from Seton Hall University and from New York University with an MA In Literature. She enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Drew University from 1977-1980. She married Dennis Gillan; they have two children, John and Jennifer, and two grandchildren, Caroline and Jackson. She is the Founder /Executive Director of the in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the , and is the Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published 20 books. Her most recent is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a collection of her poetry and watercolor artwork. Her craft book, Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories was published in 2013. She is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey. Since 2012 she has been in the Honour Committee of Immagine & Poesia, the artistic literary movement founded in Turin, Italy, with the patronage of Aeronwy Thomas. She lives in Hawthorne, New Jersey.
"After School on Ordinary Days"; "Growing Up Italian"; "Daddy, We Called You"; "The Black Bear On My Neighbors Lawn in New Jersey"; "Love Poem to My Husband of Thirty-One Years"; "I Dream of My Grandmother and Great Grandmother"; "Paterson"; "Learning to Love Myself"; "Public School #18"; "Watching the Bridge Collapse"; "How The Dead Return"; "Last Night at the Hampton Inn"; "Sometimes I forget How Fragile the Heart Is"; "On Being Italian"; "Photo of My Sister"; "At Eleven, My Granddaughter Loves to Read"; "The Ghosts in Our Bed"; "Breakfast at the I Hop"; "Your Voice on the Phone Wobbles"; "In Second Grade" "How Do I Pack Up the House of My Life?"; "Couch Buddha"; "Poem to John"; "In My Dream, I see You"; "My Father Always Bought Used Cars"; "My Son Tells Me Not to Wear My Poet's Clothes"
, in Prairie Schooner
Books of poetry
The Weather of Old Seasons, Cross-Cultural Communications, 1989,
Where I Come From, 1995, Guernica Editions,
Things My Mother Told Me, Guernica Editions, 1999,
Identity Lessons, editors Maria M. Gillan, Jennifer Gillan, Penguin Putnam, 1999
Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American, editors Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jennifer Gillan, San Val, Incorporated, 1999
Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry, editors Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jennifer Gillan, Paw Prints, 2008
