Maria Mazziotti Gillan was born March 12, 1940, in an Italian enclave in Paterson, New Jersey's Riverside neighborhood.

[3] She is the founder and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey,[4] and editor of the Paterson Literary Review,[5] and is the director of the creative writing program and professor of poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.

[6] Gillan founded Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in 1980, after receiving a grant from the State Council on the Arts, and featured speakers including Allan Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Stanley Kunitz.

One of her most recent is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets (Redux Consortium, 2014), a collection of her poetry and watercolor artwork.

Her craft book, Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica) was published in 2013.