Tea and Conversation with Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Join us for tea and conversation as Julie Maloney, Director of Women Reading Aloud, conducts an up-close and personal interview with award-winning poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan at Bernardsville Public Library on Sunday, March 6 at 2:00 pm. Audience members will have a rare opportunity to ask the author questions about her work and her writing process. A book signing will follow the interview; books will be available for purchase at the event.

Ms. Gillan, who lives in Hawthorne, is a recipient of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the 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.” She received the New Jersey Governor’s Award for Literary Outreach and The Dare to Imagine Award from Very Special Arts. She is the author of 20 books including “Writing Poetry to Save Your Life” (2013) and “The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (2014).”

The Founder /Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review, Ms. Gillan is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.

Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The New York Times, Poetry Ireland, Connecticut Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Christian Science Monitor, LIPS, and Rattle, as well as numerous other journals and anthologies.

Interviewer Julie Maloney has worked in the arts as a performer and educator her entire life. She is a poet and writer and founder/director of Women Reading Aloud (WRA), a not-for-profit organization that promotes women writers in New Jersey and beyond. WRA holds workshops, special events, writing retreats, conferences and an on-going writing workshop series each spring and fall during which women writers of all genres hone their work in a salon type setting. The annual Writer’s Weekend Retreat is held each April in Sea Girt, NJ. In June, WRA returns to the island of Alonnisos in the North Sporades for its sixth Writer’s Retreat in Greece. Ms. Maloney is a frequent speaker on “Writing as a Life Tool.”

There is no charge to attend the program at the library, but advance sign-up is requested. Register online at www.bernardsvillelibrary.org and follow the link from Adult Programs, or call the library at 908-766-0118 to sign up.