Biographical
MARY CAPPELLO was born in Darby, Pennsylvania, a land originally inhabited by the Delaware Indians (Lenni Lenape), later by Quakers, and in 1960, the year of her birth, by Catholic and Baptist working class communities of Irish, Italian, and African descent. She attended, for better or worse, Blessed Virgin Mary grade school, and Darby Colwyn High School. She took her BA at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and, following a teaching stint at Princeton High School in New Jersey, achieved the MA and Ph.D. at SUNY/Buffalo’s Psychoanalytic Center for the Arts where she studied American Literature, and Creative Writing with Carl Dennis and Ann Haskell, and where she was moved and changed by the lectures of Susan Howe, Martin Pops, Irving Massey, and Nancy Armstrong. She completed a dissertation in the then burgeoning area of Literature and Medicine, and soon thereafter, was honored with the Richard Beale Davis prize for the Best Essay published in Early American Literature. Cappello enjoyed her first academic position as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester where she gained a second education through the stimulating work of her colleagues in a variety of disciplines, and where she was honored, in her second year of teaching there, with the Teacher of the Year Award from U of Rochester’s Undergraduate Student Association. As a graduate student at SUNY/Buffalo, she had been honored with the university-wide Excellence in Teaching Award as well. Cappello moved on to an academic position that seemed tailor-made for her at the University of Rhode Island, and where she has enjoyed the privilege since 1991 of cultivating her work as a practitioner of literary nonfiction and experimental prose, memoir, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism.
In recent years, she has been honored with a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia, a unique institution where students study to be literary translators, literary critics, and writers. Her essay on living in Moscow during the events of September 11th , originally titled, “Kak Pa Russkie Terror?/How Do You Say Terror in Russian?,” and later titled, “Moscow, 9/11”can be found in the Summer 2002 issue of Raritan. Prompted by a question posed by an administrator at the Institute, who asked her, “Can creative writing be taught?”, she composed a lecture which she delivered to a group of teachers-in-training at the Open University, Moscow, and which went on, in essay form, and with the title, “Can Creative Writing be Taught,” to win the First Annual Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York. Cappello was the recipient with photographer Paola Ferrario of the Dorothea Lange - Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for "Pane Amaro/Bitter Bread: The Struggle of New Immigrants to Italy," a collaborative venture to document the lives of new immigrants to Italy in word and image. Hand to Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, September 19th 2005 through January 18th, 2006, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, includes Cappello’s prose poems, “No Strings Attached,” “Red Cycle,” “Black Panther,” and “In the Province of Actuality,” excerpts of which appear in Document
Photo Credits
Top of page: Yaroslava Muratova, colleague, and Nadya Koncha, student and translator experiencing the jouissance of reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons in Mary Cappello’s poetry writing class at the Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow, Russia, Fall 2001
Bottom of Page: Teachers Tatiana Orlova and her mother Nina give Cappello Russian Lessons at their Dacha outside of Moscow
