Award-Winning Author
Autobiography of Illness/Biography of Cure
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Stern Center, Great Room, 7:00 p.m.
An illustrated reading that brings together writing about self in the form of “rituals in transfigured time” and writing about the other in the form of lyric biography. Cappello will discuss her entry into cancer treatment as a patient-writer and her new book on Chevalier Jackson, a Pennsylvania physician-artist, a pioneering laryngologist, and a foreign body specialist.
This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of English, Sociology and American Studies.
Biography (provided by the speaker)
Mary Cappello (class of ’82) is the author of Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor who Extracted Them (The New Press, 2011). Her three previous books of literary nonfiction are Awkward, a Los Angeles Times Bestseller; Called Back, a critical memoir on cancer that won a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publisher Book Award; and the memoir, Night Bloom, set in the suburbs of Philadelphia. A recipient of the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, she is former Fulbright lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow) and, currently a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island, where she also teaches classes in Literature and Medicine. Cappello’s latest book has been featured most recently in The New York Times, on Salon.com, and on radio programs across the nation and the world.
Video of the Program