The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets

by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

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.

74 pages, Paperback

First published May 5, 2014

About the author

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions). Her latest book is What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010).

She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY.

She has published twelve books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), and Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica Editions). With her daughter Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers).

Maria was born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, attended Paterson public schools and is a graduate of Eastside High School. She now lives in Hawthorne, New Jersey.