A Fireside Chat on Legacy: From Immigrant Roots to the Retirement of Maria Mazziotti Gillan by Arianne Bakelmun

(Reporter Arianne Bakelmun pictured with Maria Mazziotti Gillan at her desk at the historic Hamilton Club)

On Feb. 7th, 2026 at 1 p.m., Paterson’s bitter chill didn’t keep poets or admirers away from the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award readings. The gathering became an emotional celebration of former Executive Director Maria, who received a standing ovation in recognition of the decades she devoted to shaping the city’s literary life.

Over her 45 years at the Center she founded in 1980, Maria transformed it into a welcoming home for poets of every generation, drawing writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky, Diane di Prima, Gerald Stern, Patricia Smith, and Martín Espada. Now retired, she leaves behind a community deeply marked by her steady vision, generosity, and care.

The celebration was an outpouring of love for someone who has poured so much love into her community, students, and everyone she’s touched.

I interviewed her a few days later. As I walk into Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s office, she is speaking Italian, for which she promptly apologizes. She offers the explanation, “I grew up speaking Italian.”

Her dark hair frames lively eyes and she lets me know that the weather makes her very crabby.

(Maria Mazziotti Gillan's office at the historic Hamilton Club, Paterson)

Despite the self-proclaimed crabbiness, Maria emanates the animation and warmth that causes hordes of people to call her mom, and many others to claim her as their grandma. It’s partially the familial way she signs texts, “Love, Maria,” and address you as “honey.” But it’s more than that.

We’re soon talking about cultural food and Maria admits to disliking American food. “That’s terrible to say. I…I really like my own food!..I don’t really love American food anymore. For a while I thought it was making me American. You know, I wanted to be American in the worst way. And I wanted people to see me as American, but of course they didn’t.”

To this day, her poetry contends with the duality of Italian immigrant identity in relationship with American identity. From apologizing for initially speaking Italian, to defiantly asserting her preference for spaghetti, Maria still vacillates between the two. She has developed the courage to be more visible. Unafraid to speak her mind, she hopes to give the same courage to everyone she meets.

MMG: [My] first encounter with poetry, was in Public School Number 18. In Paterson, where the teachers would read these 19th century poems. I loved them. I fell in love with the way English poetry sounded. That was something my parents couldn't do because they didn't actually speak English. So they told us stories but they were in Italian.

Maria wrote her first play when she was nine.

MMG: I'm sure it was terrible. I started writing poems, [but] then I was still afraid. I was still hiding behind language and trying to prove I was smart. You know, I was afraid people would think I was an idiot immigrant and nobody would want to listen to me.

She was first published in a Catholic publication called St. Anthony’s Messenger with a poem about a dog wagging its tail.

MMG: Now, I didn't have a dog, I knew absolutely nothing about dogs. It was the lesson of what not to do.

But from there, she began reading a lot of imagist poems, writing a lot of haikus, and all the while imitating and learning for herself.

Finally, at fifteen, she got two pages of poetry accepted by an Italian American journal.

MMG: They [called me] the “next great Italian-American poet.” It was such a nice feeling.

Forty or so years later, at her father’s house for dinner, Maria’s father approached her.

MMG:  He always had these little treasures he would give me. And he comes with this magazine, and he said, “You remember this?” And he gives it to me. He saved all this stuff. He saved this magazine, which I had lost track of 40 years before.

Now her forty-sixth year at Paterson’s historic Hamilton Club Poetry Center, where she served as Executive Director causes her to reflect, “I feel every day in my bones.”

AB (Arianne Bakelmun): Has that amount of years widened or changed your perspective on how you want to organize things?

MMG (Maria Mazziotti Gillan): First, I had to learn to do the job because I had never done a job like this before. I had always taught. I had never done administrative work. I had never done a press release. I had never done a budget. I’d never done a grant report. So I had to learn to do all those things. And there wasn’t anybody to teach me. So I taught myself how to do it. And then after a while…I expanded all the programs that I started [and they] got bigger and bigger, because I have an idea and then it blossoms into this gigantic thing.

This is a running theme for Maria.

MMG: I’m kind of a genius that way! I always thought of myself as kind of a lower-class, immigrant kid who’s kind of stupid. And I realized as my life has gone on, I’m amazing. Where I come from, I shouldn’t have been able to do anything.

From her first secretary who didn’t know the alphabet, to another who refused to sit and would do the entirety of the job standing, Maria reminisces on the humble beginnings of her Poetry Center. At first, she was afforded just five work-study students in lieu of employees. She speaks lovingly about how it expanded to a crew of employees including Alin Papazian’s handling the grants, Jane Hall’s work as Art Gallery Coordinator, and Susan Amsterdam’s

Theater and Poetry Project.

The Theater and Poetry Project was an entity unto itself, putting on forty theater performances a year. Maria finds meaning in having done this for the children of Paterson.

MMG: I grew up here. [As an adult, returning,] I thought this is no different. It’s worse than when I was here growing up, where there were no extra-curricular activities. There were no field trips, no trips to the theater.

Money limited the options for families in Paterson. So, Maria started the theater program with grants that made its magic accessible.

MMG: [When I was thirteen] I had a cousin who went to school in New York and worked at NBC. And she got tickets for South Pacific and took me for my birthday. And when we got in the theater, they turned the lights down and they turned the lights on the stage. All of a sudden, I thought, there's another life! There's a life that can be made of poetry, words, language, music! There's another life! And so, it really threw open a door. I always told her, you really saved my life when you did that. Because that might not have been important to you, but to me, at 13, it was very important.

The Theater and Poetry Project lives on though Maria laments at the grants that have been cut, limiting the scope of their productions. In fact, she has some choice words and names names but cautions me with a laugh, “Don’t put that in!”

Maria and consultant Lisa Coll-Nicolaou have built the program back up, and they are now expanded into Jersey City and South Orange with goals of growing it in other countries. This national effort incorporates book awards, poetry contests, a magazine, and a YouTube channel.

Maria is also at the helm of Paterson Literary Review.

MMG: I wanted it to be elegant. Paterson Literary Review sounds serious I started the reading series first. I didn't have any money. So I would have my friends read for nothing. Doing me a favor. And then I got a grant from the state council in 1980 for $2,500.

From there she was able to hold contests with prizes and payment. As time went on, her readings included William Stafford, Lucille Clifton, Alan Ginsburg, and Amiri Baraka.

Maria is used to navigating this ebb and flow with her characteristic perseverance and humor.

When she first started out she was sensible about her dreams.

MMG: I knew I could not be a poet unless I found a way to support myself. I wasn't so impractical that I thought I could just walk on a stage in New York City and be accepted. No! I knew I had to find a way to support myself, and I did work for Social Security Administration—boring job—for a year and a half. I was losing my mind. Only time in my life, I couldn't write. So I said, “You have to do something. You have to do something about this.” So, I saw an ad for a job of teaching at Caldwell College. I called up and I went for an interview, and I was so shy, I was so afraid. I mean, I went there, I was shaking, and they hired me!  And I had never taught before.

Maria found that old styles of lecturing did not work for her. She arranged her class to sit in a circle to discuss ideas, books, and what struck them as important.

The students loved her. The symbolic circle of desks became a core tenant she repeated, later at Binghamton University.

Here, the students wrote, “the most wonderful risk-taking poems. We would be crying. We would have to hand out tissues in class.”

Her inclusivity and making space for all voices remains essential to her Poetry Center to this day.

However, soon after marriage, she felt pressure to have children. She loves her children. Yet, to that pressure, today she would have said, “No, no, no!”

After just getting the grip on teaching, Maria had a hard time leaving her beloved job. Even when her children were babies, she wrote college review books as they napped and was published by Simon & Schuster.

MMG: I never stop. I mean, it's not like I'm ever going to just lie down and say, I'm not doing anything. Because I had a different idea of what I was going to do.

It was scary to get back into teaching after being away so long.

Maria credits her mother-in-law with telling her, “You have nothing to be afraid of. You were a wonderful teacher. You'll be a wonderful teacher. Now, go, do what you have to do.”

Maria’s re-entry into the teaching began with a high school class, the only time she’s ever hated teaching. So, she picked up jobs as an adjunct professor. At one point she taught at eight different schools for very little money.

MMG: I would have done it for free to be honest. I really loved to teach. I've been very lucky. I love teaching and I got to do it. I love writing and creating programs, and I got to do it. I love being a mother, and a grandmother, and that's a lovely thing. I've been really, really fortunate. I love going to other countries to read my poetry, I love going to other states, to read my poetry. I've been all over the United States and Europe reading my poems.

She had good examples in her parents. Her father immigrated from Italy first, and he “didn't have two cents in his pocket.” He worked in the U.S. digging roads, as a janitor, and was a rebel leader of the Union. Additionally, he had a lot of literary ambitions himself. Maria often fixed his English in the many letters he wrote to the editor.

Because of his Union affiliation, Maria’s mother was denied entry to the U.S. and had to make the trip later, in steerage, six months pregnant. “She was so sick,” Maria adds.

Yet her father was really intelligent, she emphasizes, and her mother very practical.

Even as he aged, Maria remembers her father retaining his radical political activism. He demanded to march on Washington over thirty years ago, when Reagan was president. However, at that point he was in a wheelchair and a march on Washington was out of his reach.

MMG: He wanted to say, hey, what are you doing? This is America. (laughs) And he saw what could go wrong in the country because they saw it in Italy. So he knew how quickly you lose your freedom, which I feel is slipping away from us now. And we're sitting here like a bunch of dingbats.

Her parents loved this country and Maria shares her father’s deep concern.

MMG: That's a wonderful thing about this country, that the immigrants were able to contribute so much. And so I hate what's happening now. This hatred of immigrants is more than I can bear.

Her mother, meanwhile, never discouraged Maria from bringing her book to the dinner table. She thought Maria’s poetry ambitions were crazy. Yet, her mother bought Maria her first typewriter.

MMG: She went out and bought a Smith Corona portable typewriter, in a pink case, for me. It took her a year. She sewed coats in a factory; she was paid twenty-five cents an hour. She put it on layaway. She kept paying them fifty cents a week until she had it, and she gave it to me.

Unlike many of her peers, Maria’s parents never pushed her to work at a factory or marry young.

MMG: [My mother] wanted me to do what I wanted to do.

Maria mirrors their love, intelligence, work ethic, and care for Americans and the larger world.

AB: How do you hope what you've built here would be an antidote to the closed-minded view of immigrants?

MMG: I hope my poetry is. I get letters from all over the world. I get letters from all over the country. Garrison Keillor read a lot of my poems on the Writers Almanac. And I was on All Things Considered and a couple of other NPR programs. So I get letters from people on top of a mountain in Montana, where I've never been, responding to my work [about the immigrant experience] because I think we are a country of immigrants. As a consequence, we have to make room. Because immigrants built the country.

AB: I read your poem [Shame is the Dress I Wear]. You talk about the experience of being a little [immigrant] girl. I’m wondering how you think that little girl would see you now.

MMG: She'd be fainting…I didn't talk! I was afraid of everybody. I was like a little chicken. But she's there inside me. Sometimes I'm surprised by finding she's still there.

Maria relays the memory of reading her poetry at Trinity College, seeing all the faculty dressed in tweeds, little sweaters, and nylons, looking the very picture of American WASP.

Maria, in her dress printed with big flowers, uncovered that day how much she still felt like that small, shame-filled girl.

AB: So what would you say to your younger self about what you've created?

MMG: I'd say, look at it! You didn’t think I can do it! I did it! (gleeful, peeling laughter) That's what I’d have to say. Pull up your big boy pants and get going! And my mother's idea was you could fall on the ground with a broken leg, and she would say, it's all in your mind, stand up.

You can do it. And that is serving me in very good stead. I mean, I have broken a lot of things, but I have gotten up again.

Maria certainly has done what she and others never could have imagined.

At a family dinner once, her cousin—the first in the family to go to college—asked sixteen-year-old Maria what she planned to do after graduation.

MMG: He was expecting me to say, “secretary.” I said, “I want to be a poet.”And he said, "Well, that is the most impractical ambition I've ever heard.” And you know, he called me about 10 years ago, and he said, " I'm very sorry I said that. I remember saying that, and you did it.”

AB: What did that mean to you to hear that?

MMG: Oh, God. Because his voice was in my head. The idea is you're too poor. Poor people are not poets. They work at a job, they get a job, they get married. Women, especially, they get married when they're 17 or 18. I knew I wasn't getting married. I knew I was going to college. Whatever I had to do to get there, I was going to go to college. And I was gonna try to be a poet.

Now that Maria has entered retirement, she leaves the Poetry Center in the capable hands of Dr. Christine Redman‑Waldeyer, who began serving as Director on Monday, March 2nd, 2026.