Modern Masters: Joseph Capista

Monday, April 15, 2019 at 6 pm, McManus Theater

Joseph Capista graduated from Loyola University Maryland in 1999 with a major in Writing and Politics and a minor in Gender Studies. His collection Intrusive Beauty was selected by Beth Ann Fennelly for Ohio University Press’s 2018 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Poems by Capista have appeared in Agni, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, and Ploughshares, and he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

As a Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest member, he worked in a group home and in a shelter serving adjudicated youth. Capista holds advanced degrees from Iowa State University and from Warren Wilson College. Capista is currently a lecturer in Towson University’s Department of English.

“In his beautifully crafted first book, Joseph J. Capista never loses focus: on sound, on theme, on formal shapeliness. Always, he writes in the gravity of saying something of human importance. He knows the strengths of limitation and the wisdom of the struggle. He knows what to withhold and what to show, but he shines most when he breaks out of the mold and writes a poetry of pure apprehension. Poems like ‘Devotional of Daily Apprehension,’ ‘Notes for the Next God,’ and ‘Composition’ are vital articulations of wonder.”

—Rodney Jones