Published in 2017
200 pages
Elena Passarello is the author of Let Me Clear My Throat (2012), a collection of essays on some unforgettable moments in the history of the human voice. Her writing on music, performance, pop culture, and the natural world has appeared in Slate, Creative Nonfiction, the Normal School, Oxford American, Iowa Review, and the 2012 music writing anthology Pop When the World Falls Apart (2012).
For a decade, Elena worked as an actor and voice-over performer throughout the East Coast and in the Midwest. She originated roles in the world premieres of Christopher Durang’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge and David Turkel’s Wild Signs and Holler. To date, she has performed seven of Shakespeare’s comedies, zero Shakespeare tragedies, and one musical version of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” She’s played a tree twice, a dead cow once, and a man at least eleven times.
A graduate of the writing programs at the University of Pittsburgh (BA) and University of Iowa (MFA), Elena was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew up in a town in Georgia called Snellville (official motto: “Where Everybody’s Somebody”). She now lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where she is an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University.
What is this book about?
Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.
