Cappello, Mary

views updated

CAPPELLO, Mary

(Mary C. Cappello)

PERSONAL: Born in Darby, PA. Education: Dickinson College, B.A.; State University of New York, Buffalo, M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Home—Providence, RI. Office—Department of English, 182 Independence Hall, 60 Upper College Rd., University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI 02881. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Taught at University of Rochester; University of Rhode Island, Kingston, professor of English; Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow, Russia, Fulbright lecturer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Richard Beale Davis Prize; Teacher of the Year Award, University of Rochester; National Endowment for the Humanities grant; Rhode Island Foundation grant; Fulbright fellowship; Lange-Taylor Prize (with photographer Paola Ferrario), Center for Documentary Studies of Duke University, 2001, for "Pane Amaro/Bitter Bread: The Struggle of New Immigrants to Italy"; Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination, Teachers and Writers Collaborative, for essay "Can Creative Writing be Taught?"

WRITINGS:

Night Bloom: A Memoir, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1998.

Work represented in anthologies; contributor of nonfiction to periodicals, including American Letters and Commentary, Western Humanities Review, Raritan, Southwest Review, and Quarterly West. Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Voices in Italian/Americana, and Radical Teacher.

Author's work has been translated into Italian.

WORK IN PROGRESS: My Commie Sweetheart: Scenes from a Queer Friendship; The Awkward Moment, a book-length essay on awkwardness.

SIDELIGHTS: Mary Cappello has taught courses in gender studies, American literature, and creative writing. She is a poet whose work appears in a number of literary and poetry journals, and her essays have been published in various anthologies and periodicals. In Night Bloom: A Memoir, Cappello, a third-generation Italian, recounts the story of her immigrant forebears and a childhood touched by her mother's agoraphobia, her brother's depression, and her father's violence. The title of the book refers to the night-blooming Cereus, a plant that flowers at unexpected times and whose bloomings can be a cause for celebration. Cappello recalls other plants of her childhood, including the transfer of a clipping from a hedge growing in her immigrant great-grandfather's yard to her mother's garden. Jennifer Gillian reviewed the volume for MELUS and wrote that "through references to this and other plants in the family garden plot, she reads her history metaphorically, ruminating upon which plants and offshoots received too much or too little sun, which were pruned too early or suffered from neglect, and finally, which plants, like the title's referent … flowered miraculously."

New York Times reviewer Sara Ivry felt that in Night Bloom Cappello "overintellectualizes the otherwise gripping memories she describes," and added that the author's tendency to seek "hidden meaning in just about everything … quickly grows tiresome." Like her grandfather and father before her, Cappello finds solace in tending her flower garden, and Ivry admitted that the author's memoir does offer "fleeting glimpses of beauty." In a review for Publishers Weekly, a contributor wrote that, "ultimately, this isn't a coherent whole but rather a grab bag of ideas, beautifully expressed." Gillian concluded by saying that the book's "remarkable pastiche of folklore, family gossip, literary illusions, gardening advice, and personal correspondence suggests … an understanding that identity is not singular or stable." Night Bloom "reflects an acceptance of the indeterminacy of identity," the critic added, "a recognition that the search for knowledge of the self is ongoing because the strands of identity can never be separated or neatly tied together."