A 2011 Guggenheim fellow in nonfiction, Mary Cappello is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Awkward: A Detour (2007), the memoir Night Bloom (1999), and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them (2011), which yielded numerous national and international invited talks and illustrated readings. Her writing has appeared in Salmagundi, Hotel Amerika, Southwest Review, Cabinet Magazine, and Georgia Review, and has been featured in the New York Times, Salon, and NPR, among other publications. She has also been published in After Montaigne; the Cambridge Companion to Autobiography; Bending Genre: Theorizing Creative Nonfiction, and honored six times between 2005 and 2014 with Notable Essay of the Year citations in Best American Essays. Cappello has received a number of fellowships and prizes. Her book Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life (2009) won a Foreword Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize. She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to teach at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow; the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies; the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative; and a 2011 Recognition for Outstanding Contributions to Research at the University of Rhode Island.