Author Description

The place that Maria Mazziotti Gillan calls home is a universal haven built of enduring memories and peopled by loving family. In Gillan’s newest book of poetry, *The Place I Call Home*, we share her complex emotions of an immigrant childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, in the 1950s, her long marriage, her husband’s devastating illness, and her subsequent widowhood. Yet, we also share the sheltering family in which she grew up, the deep love binding her and her husband, the unfolding of her life as a mother and grandmother, and, most of all, her resilient spirit. She reminds us that even when the bud of youthful naïveté flowers into the reality of an uncaring universe, we are home again when we recall the protection we felt within the warm sanctuary of family. These poems are beautiful crystalline narratives, sometimes exuberant and sometimes poignant, but always unflinchingly true.