Poets Laura Boss, Maria Gillan to read at SCCC on April 7

Newton - Poets Laura Boss and Maria Mazziotti Gillan will read from their works from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.on Friday, April 7, in the Betty June Silconas Poetry Center, located in the library at Sussex County Community College, One College Hill Rd. in Newton. The event, which will celebrate “National Poetry Month,” is part of the Idiom Reading Series sponsored by the poetry center. Boss was a first-prize winner in the Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Poetry Contest. Founder and editor of Lips poetry magazine, she has also received awards for her poetry from the National Education Association and the N.J. State Council for the Arts. Her six books of poetry include include Stripping, On the Edge of the Hudson and Arms: New and Selected Work. Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times. Maria Gillan is the founder and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson. She is also a professor and the director of the creative writing program at Binghamton University-State University of New York. Gillan has published eight books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons, Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women in Black Dresses. She is co-editor with her daughter, Jennifer, of three anthologies dealing with ethnicity in America, and co-edited with her daughters Jennifer Gillan and Edvige Giunta, Italian American Writers on New Jersey. She is the editor of the award-winning Paterson Literary Review. The evening of poetry is free and open to the public. For information, call 973-300-2194.