Mary Gilliland

Mary Gilliland (she/they) is the author of Ember Days (Codhill 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), among other books. 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 and a Council for the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University. She has taught and performed at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival, the Chautauqua Institution, and the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies. 

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.