Mary Gilliland

Mary Gilliland is the author of four poetry collections: Ember Days, The Devil’s Fools, winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and the CNY Poetry Award, The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize, and Gathering Fire. 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. Gilliland was the featured poet at the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival in 2009 and was cited in the BBC Wildlife Magazine (2002) Poet of the Year awards. Other honors include a Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and a Cornell Council on the Arts Faculty Grant to develop a section focused on the Labyrinth for the Society for Humanities course “Mind & Memory: Creativity in the Arts & Sciences.” She has served as faculty advisor for Ursus: Cornell's Environmental Journal and on the boards of the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Durland Alternatives Library, Light on the Hill Retreat Center (founding member), and Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies. After college she and her husband-to-be apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills, studying Buddhism and helping build a wood-framed public school. Mary is a poet, ecologist, and occasional essayist in New York’s Finger Lakes Region.

Alice Fulton has called Gilliland “by turns mystical and realist” with a vision “profound and enduring,” and describes the work in her newest book as “sinewy” and “nuanced”—“poems that understand earth—and consciousness—as gardens that no walls or enchantments can protect.”

Workshop and presentation topics that Mary has created include ‘Litanies and Labyrinths’; ‘Michael Field: Poetic Collaboration between a Victorian Aunt and Niece’; ‘Walking Out of Oneself: Poetry and Labyrinths’; ‘Writing from the Heart.’

Info on Gilliland's academic teaching career can be found at her Cornell Senior Lecturer Emeritus page https://knight.as.cornell.edu/mary-gilli...