Mary Cappello

Mary Cappello composes essays, memoir, literary nonfiction and experiments in prose, always with the aim of bringing a poetic sensibility into concert with a scholarly ethos. Cappello likes to take on unfathomables and to find, or invent, a form for them. She likes to write about things that are fundamental to our being but beyond our comprehension. Often enough, her work treats the ungraspable center of language itself. Her six books include a mnemic collage based on a twinned legacy of violence and creativity in her Italian/American family; an anti-chronicle meant to thwart the ritualized routine of breast cancer treatment in the US; a Los Angeles Times bestselling detour on awkwardness—ontological, diplomatic, aesthetic, and social; discursive double portraits on the forms that friendship took between gay men and lesbians during the AIDS epidemic; a lyric biography of a medical pioneer and his cabinet of swallowed and aspirated things; and, most recently, the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her work appears frequently in literary journals and anthologies as well as in more popular venues such as the New York Times, on NPR, in guest author blogs and in on-line dialog with other writers and thinkers. Her theoretical and pedagogical writing about the essay addresses such matters as queer aesthetics; discursive autobiography; epistolary critique; the uncommon archive; digression; alternative histories of the essay; the essay in performance; creative nonfiction and lyric essay; and the very question of whether creative writing can be taught. Cappello’s numerous literary, research, and teaching honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, and a Berlin Prize; The Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies; and The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative. Cappello is a former Fulbright Lecturer (Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow), and Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. Visit her at her website: www.marycappello.com.