Book honors stewards of Hispano traditions in one of the state’s true cultural enclaves
Resident of Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast of New Zealand, Suzanne MacAulay is an art historian, folklorist and ethnographer. She is Professor Emerita and former chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her research interests are arts revitalizations, ethnographic textiles, particularly Spanish Colonial colcha embroidery and Maori weaving. Her book, Stitching Rites, is the first comprehensive academic treatment of Spanish colonial colcha embroidery and Hispanic art revitalization movements. In 2019 she successfully nominated Josephine Lobato, folk artist from the San Luis Valley, Colorado, for a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship Award.
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
