Mary Cappello is a queer practitioner of the essay, experiments in prose, memoir, literary nonfiction, and performative criticism. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, she is the author of seven books that include a detour on awkwardness; a breast-cancer anti-chronicle; a lyric biography; a speculative manifesto; and the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In. Keen to reconceive the forms nonfiction takes in public to meet the pressing political needs of our time, she has authored projects like the essay as collaborative mood room, and the inter-active anti-panel, while also calling for a return to the lecture as a sounding, contemplative art. A former Fulbright fellow at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow), she is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island.