Mary Gilliland aims to charm, alarm, and galvanize her listeners and readers. She has authored In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder, Ember Days, the award-winning The Devil’s Fools and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, and Gathering Fire. 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.

Born in Philadelphia, Mary Gilliland was raised in the incipient New Jersey suburbs. After college, she and her husband-to-be Peter Fortunato apprenticed with Gary Snyder, studying carpentry, ecology, and the great Zen texts while living off-grid on San Juan Ridge and earning money in Bay Area construction during the winter. Back East at Cornell she developed a decentralized walk-in writing service for students, staff, and faculty. Gilliland has also taught at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and the Chautauqua Institute, traveled in Oman, Iceland, Egypt, Italy, Greece. She has helped build labyrinths and standing stone circles and been a board member of The Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Light On The Hill Retreat Center, and Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, the Dalai Lama’s seat in North America. Mary retired early from Cornell in order to devote herself to poetry.

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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.