Please join us on Thursday, February 23rd at 7pm for a reading with Mary Cappello, author of the new book “Life Breaks in: A Mood Almanack”. Joining her will be writers Elaine Sexton, Kristin Prevallet, and Dawn Raffel. A frequent contributor to the worlds of literary nonfiction and experimental prose, Mary Cappello is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour (a Los Angeles Times bestseller); Swallow, based on the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum; and, most recently, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, on NPR, in guest author blogs for Powells Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, a recipient of The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, Cappello is a former Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow), and currently Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. Visit her at her website: www.marycappello.com
Elaine Sexton's third collection of poetry, Prospect/Refuge, was published by Sheep Meadow Press in late 2015. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in Art in America, American Poetry Review, Poetry, O! the Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere on line and in print, including Poetry Daily. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and teaches text and image poetry workshops privately, and at various arts organizations and colleges including the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, and New York University. www.elainesexton.org
Dawn Raffel’s most recent book is an illustrated memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, which was a Wall Street Journal bestseller. She is also the author of a novel, Carrying the Body, and two story collections— Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division. Her writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies—most recently The Best Small Fictions 2015 (selected by Robert Olen Butler) and The Best Small Fictions 2016 (selected by Stuart Dybek). Her next book, a cultural history, is under contract at Blue Rider/Penguin.
Kristin Prevallet is a poet, essayist, and teacher with a private hypnosis practice in Westchester, NY. Recently, her poems and essays have appeared in The Boston Review, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and featured in Rachel Zucker's Commonplace podcast. She is the author of five books of poetry including the fragmented memoir, I, Afterlife: Essay In Mourning Time; she is also the author of two non-fiction books about language and the unconscious mind: Trance Poetics: Your Writing Mind, and Visualize Comfort: Self-healing and the Unconscious Mind. She teaches for Bard College's Prison Initiative and leads private self-healing and trance writing retreats. Follow her blog: www.trancepoetics.com