Overview
Mary Gilliland is the author of four poetry collections: Ember Days, The Devil’s Fools, winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and the CNY Poetry Award, The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize, and Gathering Fire. Her work has been anthologized most recently in Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems on Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice; Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands; and Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. Individual poems have appeared in such publications as AGNI, Chautauqua, Epoch, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, and Tampa Review. Honors include the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, the International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry, and a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant to develop a section focused on the Labyrinth for the Society for Humanities course “Mind & Memory: Creativity in the Arts & Sciences.”
Gilliland began teaching writing at Cornell in 1978 with the Committee on Special Education Projects and retired from the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines in 2008. She taught creative writing and the expository writing “America Dreaming” for the Department of Literatures in English. For the Biology & Society Program, she created the First-year Writing Seminar Program’s first interdisciplinary course, “Ecosystems & Ego Systems,” in 1983 and taught it annually through the 2006 section at Cornell's branch campus in Doha. There she also advised on the initiation of the Foundation Program and on the staffing and development of the Writing Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar, and was a featured poet at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival.
From 1991 she directed the Knight Institute’s Writing Walk-In Service, composed The Writing Walk-In Service Handbook, and developed a pilot for Peer Writing Mentors. She assisted with faculty development at the Knight Institute Summer Faculty Seminars and at the International Knight Consortium for Writing in the Disciplines. Conference presentations included papers at the Associated Writing Programs, Conference on College Composition and Communication, European Association for Teaching Academic Writing, International Conference of Women in Higher Education, International Writing Centers Association, National Women’s Studies Association, and Writing Development in Higher Education. Her approach to both classroom and tutorial is a self-reflective practice of re-imagining, co-creating, learning from each other. She has served as faculty advisor for Ursus: Cornell's Environmental Journal and on the boards of the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Durland Alternatives Library, Light on the Hill Retreat Center (founding member), and Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies.
In the news
https://gradschool.cornell.edu/alumni/alumni-newsletter-winter-2021/alumni-in-the-news/ scroll to The “America is Hard to Find” Rock mass, 50 Years Later
https://qatar-weill.cornell.edu/news-archive/Reports/2006/writing_rt.html
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2004/01/spring-2004-mind-and-memory-lectures-begin-feb-2
Research Focus
- Poetry, lyric, longform, hybrid
- Creative nonfiction
- Eco-feminist pedagogy
- Anglo-Saxon & medieval lit