Mary Gilliland is the author of two award-winning poetry collections: The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020) and The Devil’s Fools (2022). Honors include a Stanley Kunitz Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a featured reading at the Al Jazeera International film Festival, 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.

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, held residencies in Scotland and the United States, traveled in Oman, Iceland, Egypt, Italy, Greece. Mary 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.

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