About Leo Mark Marcello
Leo Luke Marcello, (August 6, 1945-March 30, 2005) was born in DeRidder, Louisiana, to Dr. Luke M. and Bert DiGiglia Marcello, both descendants of Sicilian immigrants. Leo received a B.A. from Tulane University, a M.A. and a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. He studied philosophy and pre-theology at the University of Dallas and theology at Catholic University of America. He taught at Howard University, for the University of Maryland in Wales, and at McNeese State University, where he held both the first Shearman Professorship in Humanities and the Shearman Professorship of Liberal Arts.
He is also the author of four books poetry and 15 Days of Prayer with Saint Katharine Drexel (Ligouri, 2002) and the editor of Everything Comes to Light: A Festschrift for Joy Scantlebury (The Cramers Press, 1993). Leo's many poetry awards include the David Lloyd Kreeger Award in poetry as well as a Deep South Writers Award. He also won the Acme Prize in fiction and has received two Shearman Fellowships at McNeese State University.
Leo had part in three collaborations with visual artists, the first a series of poems with lithographs by Larry Schuh. The series, entitled Contending with Beasts and Angels, focuses on the stories of Jacob and Esau and Abraham and Isaac. The second is a series of poems, paintings, and drawings about the life and work of Saint Katharine Drexel (poems published as Blackrobe's Love Letters ) in collaboration with his brother, artist Chris Marcello. This program has appeared many times all over the country and was featured as a cover story for the National Catholic Reporter in 2001. A third collaboration was with photographer Gary Porter, whose black-and-white photographs of a Lake Charles Mardi Gras parade served as the inspiration for Leo's sequence of poems entitled Mardi Gras in Black and White.
BOOKS OF POETRY
Nothing Grows in One Place Forever (Time Being Books, 1998)
Silent Film (Mellen Poetry Press, 1997)
Blackrobe's Love Letters (Xavier Review Press, 1994; reprinted by The Cramers Press, 2000)
The Secret Proximity of Everywhere (Blue Heron Press, 1994)
