A Lesson on "Daddy, We Called You"

In this teacher video resource from wayground.com, Maria Mazziotti Gillan reads her poem, "Daddy, We Called You," about an experience growing up in a poor immigrant family in Paterson, New Jersey. It highlights the struggles with language and cultural identity, the dual roles within the family, and the contrast between home life and external perceptions. 

She reflects on the sacrifices made by their father, who worked multiple jobs to support the family, and acknowledges the profound impact he had on their life. The narrative concludes with a later, more mature and deep appreciation for the father's efforts and the shaping of the speaker's identity.

View the video and lesson

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Martín Espada and Dante Di Stefano December 6 in Paterson

The Poetry Center offers poetry writing workshops in-person and virtually in conjunction with the Distinguished Poets Reading Series. Over the years, distinguished poets have included poet laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, Inaugural poets and others of national and international reputation, such as Allen Ginsberg, William Stafford, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Stanley Kunitz, Billy Collins, Marge Piercy, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Kim Addonizio, Billy Collins, Dorianne Laux, Robert Sward, Patricia Smith, Martín Espada, Toi Derricotte and Richard Blanco.

The first event of the new season will be on December 6, 2025, and feature Martín Espada and Dante Di Stefano. 

In-person workshops will be held in Academic Hall on the PCCC main campus. Afterwards, we invite you to join us for an hour of socializing and refreshments in the nearby Paterson Room. Readings by Martín and Dante will also take place in the Paterson room at 1 pm. After which, there will be a book signing by the Distinguished Poets, and the mic will open up for anyone who wants to share their poetry. 

All readings are free and open to the public. Readings are recorded and archived for viewing on the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel.

There is limited enrollment, and workshops generally fill up, so register early. For full information, open the registration form link below. Check on registration availability by emailing Cynthia Pagan at the Poetry Center.

Martín Espada’s new book of poems from Knopf is called Jailbreak of Sparrows. His previous book of poems, Floaters, won the National Book Award. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook, including, most recently, the book-length poem, The Widowing Radiance (Bordighera Press, 2025). His writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2018, Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. He has won the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize (UK), the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, and many more awards. He co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018). He teaches high school English in Endicott, NY, and lives in Endwell, New York, with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, their son, Dante Jr., and their goldendoodle, Sunny.

The college is limiting the number of attendees for all the events, so registration is required and limited for workshops. ​Everyone visiting the Poetry Center for workshops and readings should be vaccinated. Coffee, tea, and a light breakfast will be provided for workshop participants. Poets will give a poetry reading following their workshop. 

Directions and parking information

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Becoming Visible

In the essay, "Becoming Visible: Personal and Collective Histories in Susan Caperna Lloyd and Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s Documentary Films," by Elisabetta Marino, the author examines how a film about Maria expands on the reading of her poetry.

EXCERPT

"Writers and artists Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Susan Caperna Lloyd have captured this struggle in their multi-faceted work, forcefully portraying their alienation, the self-erasure that often came with trying to succeed in America, as well as their proud assertion of their ethnic identity. This essay sets out to investigate the ways they both used documentary films—The Baggage (2001) and All That Lies between Us (2007)—as a means to restore visibility, reclaim complexity, and give voice to the Italian American experience...

All That Lies Between Us, a 55-minute documentary film by Kevin Carey and Mark  Hillringhouse,  shares  its  title  with  the  poetry  collection  Maria  Mazziotti  Gillan  published  in  2007.  It  visually  complements  the  volume,  which  explores  various themes, such as personal and collective family memories, broader reflec-tions on the future in its continuity with the past, and the intention of embracing one’s  fragility,  transforming  it  into  strength,  while  exorcising  fears  and  frustrat-ing feelings of inadequacy. Both Mazziotti Gillan’s artistic output and Carey and Hillringhouse’s  documentary  film  compellingly exemplify what Mary Jo Bona  refers to when emphasizing  the  capacity  for  resistance  among  some  American  writers of Italian origin, “engaged in making visible the fact that Italian Ameri-cans exist contrary to their own tendencies towards self-negation and subscription to an outmoded dependence on the cultural code of silence: omertà”

Watch the documentary

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

Poem: Carrying Their Hometowns to Paterson

Carrying Their Hometowns to Paterson

On the street where I grew up,

everyone knew everyone else.

We knew each other’s secrets,

though we pretended we didn’t.

Our street was lined with

two-and three-family houses

full of immigrants from southern Italy.

There was one young Irish couple - 

they moved out quickly.

Another Italian family moved in.

These immigrants came from Cilento

and Calabria and Sicily. Paterson, at the time,

had fifty Italian societies,

named for different southern Italian regions and towns.

My father belonged to the Cilentano society

where he went to play cards

and argue about politics with the other men.

The members of the ladies' auxiliary cooked

spaghetti dinners for the men

at least once a month. On our street

it was as though these new immigrants

carried their hometowns to Paterson,

carrying their dialects and mores

and the pungent cheeses their relatives sent to them

so they’d have a piece of home

to remind them of the past.

On summer evenings, they would sit around

oilcloth-covered tables under the grape arbors

they had planted, playing cards and talking.

They needed their countrymen to replace the relatives

they had left behind in those Italian villages,

the people they never saw again who became

like stick figures, gradually fading into lines

from the blue airmail letters they sent and received,

and they worked hard in America, where the streets

were not paved in gold, but where they knew

they could give their children better lives

than what they could have given them

if they’d stayed in the mountain villages

they called home.

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.