Acclaimed Writer and Bard College Professor Mary Caponegro to Give Reading at Bard on Monday, November 15

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— Award-winning author Mary Caponegro will read from her work at Bard College on Monday, November 15. The winner of many awards, including the Rome Prize and Charles Flint Kellogg Award, Caponegro is Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Family Professor of Writing and Literature. She will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center, and is followed by a question-and-answer session. This event is free and open to the public.

Caponegro’s first fiction collection, Tales from the Next Village, appeared in 1986. She followed that book with The Star Café in 1990, and then, in 1998, Five Doubts, in which each story arises from a particular artifact—Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, contemporary consumer magazines, Etruscan tomb paintings, the Italian board game Tombola. In 2001, The Complexities of Intimacy appeared. Publishers Weekly called it “visceral and cerebral . . . tantalizing . . . daring,” while Time Out New York pointed to its “syntactic complexity, dark humor, and fabulist tendencies.”

The critical acclaim has continued for her most recent book, All Fall Down (2009), which John Madera described in Open Letters: “With a precise eye, sympathetic ear, and a commanding, sprawling, and, at times, overwhelming but no less pleasurable voice, Mary Caponegro . . . probes the minds of an odd collection of characters: a couple whose marriage is headed toward dissolution; a man torn by conflicting allegiances to his wife and mother; two other lovers whose new relationship is ravaged by the onset of illness; a woman who just can’t seem to let her daughter go; children who, in a fantastic, disturbing turn, run an abortion clinic; and, lastly, a crusty, dispassionate academic.”

A contributor to Conjunctions, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Epoch, Sulfur, Gargoyle, and Iowa Review, Caponegro has taught at Brown University, RISD, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Syracuse University.

For more information about this event or to be placed on the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series e-mail list, contact [email protected] or call 845-752-4933.

(10.18.10)

This event was last updated on 10-26-2010

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