Mary Capello

A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, Mary Cappello is primarily interested in creating forms of disruptive beauty, figuring memory in a postmodern age, bringing incompatible knowledges into the same space, and working at the borders of literary genres. Her memoir, Night Bloom (Beacon Press) is a multi-genre work that combines oral history, folklore, the bilingual journals of her Italian immigrant grandfather (a shoemaker by trade), dream-work, letters and cultural theory. Cappello's second book, Awkward:A Detour (Bellevue Literary Press), a Los Angeles Times Bestseller, is a book-length essay on "awkwardness" that ranges across subjects and conditions as diverse as ontological discomfort and situational silence, immigration and stuttering, the life and work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Emily Dickinson and Henry James, tact and touch. In 2009, Cappello's breast cancer anti-chronicle, Called Back, appeared from Alyson Books under the new directorship of Donald Weise. Called Back received a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Award (IPPY) as well as being named a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and the Publishing Triangle Award. "Getting the News," an excerpt from Called Back that appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of The Georgia Review, won a GAMMA Award for Best Feature from The Magazine Association of the Southeast. Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them appeared in January 2011 from The New Press. Part psychobiography, part cultural history, part philosophical meditation, Swallow emerges out of a collection of "foreign bodies" housed in Philadelphia's Mutter Museum: nearly 2000 swallowed or aspirated "things" that pioneering laryngologist Chevalier Jackson extracted nonsurgically from the air and foodways of people in the early 20th century and that he also saved and framed. A contribution to histories of the marvelous and the curious, Swallow brings Jackson's incomparable contributions to the history of medicine to light while simultaneously restoring the narratives, lives, and longings that haunt Jackson's collection.