Mary Cappello is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them (The New Press). Her numerous essays and her experimental prose appear in such venues as the Georgia Review, Salmagundi, and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, in Salon, in the Huffington Post, on NPR, and as a Notable Essay of the Year in The Best American Essays. Cappello is a recipient of the Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, and the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.