Stories navigating the commplicated terrain of race in America, from acclaimed writers like Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, Sandra Cisneros, Sherman Alexie, and Amy Tan The editors who brought us Unsettling America and Identity Lessons have compiled a short-story anthology that focuses on themes of racial and ethnic assimilation. With humor, passion, and grace, the contributors lay bare poignant attempts at conformity and the alienation sometimes experienced by ethnic Americans. But they also tell of the strength gained through the preservation of their communities, and the realization that it was often their difference from the norm that helped them to succeed. In pieces suggesting that American identity is far from settled, these writers illustrate the diversity that is the source of both the nation's great discord and infinite promise. "These beautiful stories radiate with the poignant, ingenious ways young people come to terms with their ethnic identities, negotiating their families, school, friends and their futures . . . This exemplary collection fulfills the editors' aims: to open dialogue and encourage the telling of difficult, adaptive or affirming life experiences." -Publisher's Weekly

Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American

Literature & Fiction

Gillan, Maria Mazziotti

Gillan, Jennifer

United States

Penguin??Books

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Looks at race and ethnicity in America

Growing Up Ethnic In America (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Jennifer Gillan, Eds.

Turtleback Books

Gathers poems by writers from many ethnic groups and includes works by Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Louise Erdrich, Ishmael Reed, and Gary Soto

Unsettling America

History & Criticism

Viking Adult

Winter Light: Poems

Poetry

Chantry Pr

The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets combines Maria Mazziotti Gillan's unique gifts as a visual artist with her already internationally known and prize winning poetry. Gillan’s imagination, whimsical sense of line and vibrant use of colors shine forth through this beautiful picture book in a manner that both compliments and contrasts with the wonderful poems. While the poetry offers moving narratives of people and events taken directly from Gillan's life, the paintings are the flip side of that record--deeply joyous, even gleeful depictions of the artist's rich, sometimes dream like inner world. Readers of her poetry have long known Gillan as a fearless witness to the challenges of class, gender and ethnicity. Her eyes have always been wide open to the sometimes difficult truths of her world. But in The Girl with The Chartreuse Jackets Maria Mazziotti Gillan has shown that her eyes are equally open to whimsy and to the dance of the imagination. This is a mature poet who has come full circle to meet a brilliant child/artist. The Girls in The Chartreuse Jackets is an essential book for anyone who wants to know the full range of Maria Mazziotti Gillan's--both as poet and as artist.

The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets

Redux Consortium

Paterson Light and Shadow tells the stories in poetry and photography of Paterson, New Jersey, from one of the most gifted poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and fine art photographer Mark Hillringhouse, who together have spent a lifetime living, growing up and working in and around one of America's most important historic industrial cities.
In her signature style, Gillan combines sublime moments with gritty detail when she writes about growing up as a working class Italian immigrant as in the lines from the poem In the Still Photograph, Paterson, New Jersey, Circa 1950: "The rough feel of a washcloth / and Lifebuoy soap against my face, / the stiff, starched feel of my blouse, / the streets of Paterson, old and cracked, / the houses leaning together / like crooked teeth..." Hillringhouse's award-winning black and white Paterson photographs accompany each poem and resonate with the mood and feeling of Gillan's writing in crushed velvety blacks and grayscale tones that evoke the moods of this city's past and its urban decay.
This collection contains over thirty poems and thirty photographs that together explore the hallowed precincts of this once great industrial city, envisioned by Alexander Hamilton as the birthplace of manufacturing in a new nation, a city now home to countless immigrants who still struggle to work and to build lives and survive.

Paterson Light and Shadow

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Serving House Books

A great selection from a fine New Jersey poet.

Where I Come From (Essential Poets Series 64)

Guernica Editions Inc.

What I hope to accomplish in this book is to give writing prompts that will help you to get past all the outside influences that keep you from believing in yourself and in your ability to write. In order to write, you need to get rid of notions about language, poetic form, and esoteric subject matter ? all the things that the poetry police have told you are essential if you are to write. I wanted to start from a different place, a place controlled by instinct rather than by intelligence. Revision, the shaping and honing of the poem, should come later, and, in revising, care always needs to be taken to retain the vitality and electricity of the poem. Anyone can learn to craft a capable poem, but it is the poems that retain that initial vitality that we remember; these are the poems that teach us how to be human.

Writing Poetry To Save Your Life: How To Find The Courage To Tell Your Stories (Personal Development)

Self-Help

Personal Transformation

Poetry. Italian American Studies. Maria Mazziotti Gillan's Ancestors' Song takes the reader on a journey, one in which she recognizes deep within herself "the voices of the women who came before," their words blending together, forming, as she tells the reader, "the beat I move to." This beat is very much a part of the narrative she weaves in her characteristically honest, intimate, and humorous voice. This beat is true, hard working, strong; a beat that began in the villages on the mountaintops in San Mauro, Italy, and continues to the present day, illuminating the path for those that will follow. These poems will move you to laughter, to tears, and a mixture of both, and are proof that Gillan is at the peak of her career. She is truly one of America's most beloved poets.

Ancestors' Song (VIA Folios)

Bordighera Press

In When the Stars Were Still Visible, Maria Mazziotti Gillan gives us the truth, unedited and directly from the heart. This gorgeously elegiac collection creates an arc that articulates her understanding of aging and gaining wisdom. In the central poem, “Claiming My True Name,” she finally embraces her Italian roots after confessing her desire to “slide right into the life of America,“ and realizes with sorrow what denying her “Italian parents and the cold-water flat,” has cost her: “How many hours have I spent drowning in shame…ashamed of our poverty, my immigrant parents, my father’s limp, his paralyzed leg dragging behind him…my own dark skin…my cheap clothes.” Throughout the second half of the collection, Gillan subtly acknowledges the shift in her own life as it parallels the lack of understanding between herself and her own children, her own frailty with that of her father and her husband. In the last poem, “Celebration in Albidona,” there is an unexpected encounter that results in an epiphany, which bridges the “old country” to the “new.” It is as if this book rose out of an alchemist’s compound comprised of Calabrian limestone and the cement of the back stoop on 17th Street in Paterson, New Jersey, where Mazziotti Gillan grew up. By the end of this poignant and resonant book, the poet accepts her double heritage with all its pain and obstacles and with all its beauty and grace.

When the Stars Were Still Visible

Stephen F. Austin University Press

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Books by Gillan, Maria Mazziotti