Mary Gilliland

Mary Gilliland aims to charm, alarm, and galvanize her listeners and readers. She has published seven collections of poetry including the award-winning The Devil’s Fools and, most recently, Within the Shop of the Divine. Honors include multimedia poetry at the National Women’s Hall of Fame, a Stanley Kunitz Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry, and a Council on the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University, where she designed and taught interdisciplinary writing courses such as ‘Ecosystems & Ego Systems’ and ‘America Dreaming.’ Her poems are widely published in print and online literary journals and most recently anthologized in Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice; Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose; and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands. In her life and work she values ecology, equality, justice, peace.

Mary Gilliland’s work has been supported through the generosity of the Fine Arts Work Center; Millay Arts; MacDowell; Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers; the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation; the Djerassi Foundation; The Studios at MASS MoCA; and Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, set high on a cliff at the very edge of Western Europe.