On March 2, Binghamton University professor Maria Gillan will be one of three writers, among them best-selling author John Grisham, to receive the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.

Presented by nonprofit organization Poets and Writers, the award honors writers who have worked to strengthen the writing community and aid their peers.

According to the Poets and Writers press release, the Writers for Writers Award “was established in 1996 to recognize authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community.”

Gillan is a professor of poetry at BU and the director of the creative writing program and director of the Binghamton Center for Writers.

Gillan’s first writer advocacy project came in 1980 with the founding of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in her hometown of Paterson, N.J. The Poetry Center seeks to encourage the work of poets by providing them with outlets to share and improve upon their work.

According to Gillan, through the center she has created various poetry contests and awards, including the Allen Ginsberg Award for individual poems. She has also established many book awards, which are grants of new books presented to schools in need.

Gillan also works to bring exposure to unknown writers of various races and backgrounds. She helps to make her fellow authors known by giving them advice, connecting them with publishers and editors and publishing their work in anthologies like “Unsettling America.”

“Our first anthology, ‘Unsettling America,’ was like throwing a bomb into the literary cannon,” Gillan said. “Other people then stole our writers, which is what we wanted to happen.”

Since coming to BU, Gillan has created new book awards, brought editors to speak with graduate students and faculty and established the Binghamton Center for Writers.

Gillan attributed her supportive nature to her upbringing by her Italian-immigrant parents. Her father acted as a people’s lawyer for the Italian-American community, drafting papers and helping with legal issues.

She said he used to tell her, “If you live your life only for yourself, you’ll end up with nothing. You have a responsibility to the world and a responsibility to others.”

In addition to all the work she does for other writers, Gillan is a published writer herself. With 12 books of poetry in print, her writing career is going strong.

“I started out trying to write poems that I thought I should be writing,” Gillan said. “Poems about Greek gods. More obscure, deliberately vague poems.”

After her first book was published in 1980, one of her graduate school professors said that the poem he appreciated most was one about her father. Gillan then realized that she could write about her own life, and the many roles she played, like Italian American, mother, wife and citizen. She now defines her work as narrative poems based on her life experiences.

Gillan’s reception of the award was first announced in an ad in Poets and Writers Magazine. After the magazine’s publication, many of the people she had helped over the years contacted her.

“I got letters and e-mails from people all over the country thanking me for helping them,” Gillan said. “I’d forgotten I had helped them.”

Jose A. Rodriguez, a graduate student who is working on his doctorate in English and creative writing, has been a student of Gillan’s for several years.

“She writes, teaches, supports the department’s literary journal Harpur Palate, manages and edits Paterson Literary Review, runs the Binghamton Book Awards, runs The Poetry Center in New Jersey. She’s unstoppable, ” Rodriguez said.

Gillan said she will continue to do whatever is within her power to draw attention to new writers and provide aid to the literary community.

“What I’ve tried to do is to open up opportunity to people who are not part of the elite. There is so much wonderful writing that goes unobserved. I want to draw attention to that writing and make people realize that they can love poetry and literature as much as I do,” she said.