We are so pleased to be welcoming Mary Gilliland for a reading of original work Friday April 11th from 5pm-6:30pm in our guest lounge.

In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder is a long-form poem inspired by a 19th c. statue created in Fukushima and by an activist whose employment with New Mexico’s Education Department made sure that no child was left behind during the 2nd Bush presidency, and whose volunteering with the Coalition for Equality was instrumental in getting passed the state’s pioneering human rights protection legislated in 2003. In the beyond, he and his life partner dialogue about their lives in the high desert of the Southwest amid the nuclear industry's benchmarks of Los Alamos and Church Rock. https://marygilliland.com/ This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Mary Gilliland (she/they) is the author of Ember Days (Codhill Press, 2024); In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder (Dancing Girl Press, 2024); The Devil’s Fools (2022), winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Award; The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (Bright Hill Press, 2020), winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize; and Gathering Fire (Ithaca House, 1982). Her poems are published in print and online literary journals and anthologies including Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022); Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose (New Rivers Press, 2021); and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands (Shabda Press, 2017). Among her awards are the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Council for the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University, the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry and multimedia at the National Women's Hall of Fame. She has taught and performed at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival, the Chautauqua Institution, and the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies. After college, Gilliland apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills, where she studied Buddhism and helped to build a wood-framed public school. She retired early from teaching at Cornell in order to devote herself to poetry, and lives in in New York’s Finger Lakes Region where she has transformed a rocky acre of Six Mile Creek into a fawn-filled woodland garden.

This program is also made possible in part with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant program from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the office of the Governor and NYS Legislature, administered by the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.