In THE SILENCE IN AN EMPTY HOUSE, Maria Mazziotti Gillan comes to the limit of human experience, stares death in the face, and struggles to keep moving. These moments she faces and speaks of so clearly are unavoidable, and the long illness and death of her husband, Dennis, is her personal version of the fundamental struggle we all face. THE SILENCE IN AN EMPTY HOUSE speaks of forgiveness, guilt and grace. With courage and a stubborn refusal to look away from the terrors that surround her on so many levels, Gillan documents the parallels between our own struggles with mortality and the struggles being played out on the world stage today. From wars to climate change to the death of whole species to her own struggles with the deaths of her husband, family and friends, she makes each of these battles the reader's own, and gives order and meaning to those fundamental things that otherwise threaten to capsize us.

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). She is the Founder/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 sixteen books, including What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions), THE PLACE I CALL HOME (NYQ Books, 2012), THE SILENCE IN AN EMPTY HOUSE (NYQ Books, 2013) and Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica). With her daughter, Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies.