How a shooting in her neighborhood spurred a writer to action and gave birth to a collaborative artist book
Mary Margaret Alvarado is the author of American Weather (NewLights Press), a book-length essay on gun violence and disarmament in collaboration with the artist Corie Cole; Chrome of Iris, winner of the 2023 Burnside Review chapbook contest; and Hey Folly (Dos Madres), a book of poems. A teacher, muralist and mother, Mia’s work has been published in The Rumpus, The Point, VQR, Outside, Cagibi, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Boston Review, The Kenyon Review and elsewhere, and thrice shortlisted in The Best American series. www.marymargaretalvarado.com
Fort Collins-based author-wizard Ramona Ausubel’s most recent novel, The Last Animal, released in 2023 and out now in paperback, makes leaps of imagination across continents and millennia seem perfectly plausible. The story involves single mother Jane, a frustrated grad student in paleobiology, recently widowed; and her two teenage daughters, Eve and Vera, The Last Animal opens with this codependent family unit on a scientific expedition to Siberia where the girls, on a typically boredom-filled afternoon, stumble upon the bones of a 4,000-year old woolly mammoth. That’s just the beginning. Mother and daughters, through a series of subterfuge-fueled moves, end up at an exotic animal farm in Italy where the DNA of their fossil is implanted into an elephant with the goal of resurrecting an extinct species. What happens beyond that is a series of tender, hilarious, heart-rending and suspenseful moments that testify to the unbreakable ties of family, for better or worse, alongside the loneliness and impossibility of thriving without connection. Smart, beguiling, touching and entertaining, The Last Animal peers into our shared animal souls, at once raising pertinent questions about the limits of bioengineering and taking the reader on a helluva good ride. — Kathryn Eastburn
