Mary Gilliland (she/they) is the author of Ember Days (Codhill Press, 2024); In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder (Dancing Girl Press, 2024); The Devil’s Fools (2022), winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Award; The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (Bright Hill Press, 2020), winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize; and Gathering Fire (Ithaca House, 1982). Her poems are published in print and online literary journals and anthologies including Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022); Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose (New Rivers Press, 2021); and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands (Shabda Press, 2017). Among her awards are the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a Council for the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University, the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry and multimedia at the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She has taught and performed at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival, the Chautauqua Institution, and the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies. After college, Gilliland apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills, where she studied Buddhism and helped to build a wood-framed public school. She retired early from teaching at Cornell in order to devote herself to poetry, and lives in in New York’s Finger Lakes Region where she has transformed a rocky acre of Six Mile Creek into a fawn-filled woodland garden.