Join Autumn Leaves Books for a night of poetry with celebrated local poets Mary Gilliland and Peter Fortunato. Both writers will read from their latest books. Mary Gilliland’s collection Within the Shop of the Divine (Arc Publication, 2025) includes poems about grief and recovery, poems “abundant in flora and fauna, rich in life and matter and earthed in the spaces and histories they emerge from.” Her chapbook Red Tide at Sandy Bend (Bodily Press, 2025) considers algal blooms, which reveal a world of toxins and creaturely interdependence both visceral and intimate.

Peter Fortunato’s books World Headquarters (Fomite, 2024) and Desert Wind: My Life in Qatar (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023) are inspired by life in Doha, nature, and the interconnectedness among the local and universal, as well as his years of teaching.

The free event will be followed by a book signing. It will be held downstairs on the groundfloor.

About the authors:
Peter Fortunato has published several poetry collections, as well as the novel Carnevale (Fomite Press, 2019) and a memoir Desert Wind: My Life in Qatar (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was awarded the Randall Jarrell Fellowship, and from Cornell University a BA in English. Fortunato has taught writing and literature at Cornell and Ithaca College, as well as at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar. Among his honors are the Emily Dickinson Prize of the Poetry Society of America, a Pablo Neruda Prize from the Oklahoma Arts Council, and a Yeats Poetry Prize from the WB Yeats Society of NY. Peter Fortunato has been a student of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism for more than 50 years, as well as an artist and practitioner of complementary alternative medicine. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Mary Gilliland is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry including The Devil’s Fools (Codhill Press, 2022), winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Award. Her poems have been published widely and collected in anthologies including Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022).

Among her awards are the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Council for the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell University. She has taught and performed at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival, the Chautauqua Institution, and the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies.

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.