In this Tip Sheet, Maria Mazzioti Gillan summarizes her contribution to the panel discussion Building Audiences for Literature, from Facing Pages: A Statewide Literary Convening, June 3, 2005. Maria Mazzioti Gillan is the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey. She is also a Professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at SUNY/Binghampton and the editor of the award-winning Paterson Literary Review. Her eight books of poetry include: Where I Come From (1995), Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica Editions, 1998), and Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica, 2002). She has won the Angelie Lauri, John Fante, May Sarton, and Fearin Houghton awards, as well as the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, and the American Literary Translator?s Award through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.