Science + Literature: Fighting Extinction

Ramona Ausubel brings science—and wooly mammoths—to life in the gendered, class conscious, and discovery-driven world of her new novel The Last Animal, a 2025 Science + Literature Selected Title. Join Ausubel for a reading and conversation on science as inspiration for writing fiction and for dreaming of a possible future for our planet. Moderated by author, researcher, and 2025 Science + Literature committee member Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery.

Limited free copies of The Last Animal will be available at the event, first come, first served. The program will be followed by a book signing.

Presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation and Metropolitan Community College.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of five books, most recently The Last Animal. She is the recipient of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, Tin House, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.

Beronda L. Montgomery, PhD is a writer, science communicator, and researcher. She has spent 20 years in academia, most recently as Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean, and Professor of Biology of Grinnell College. Dr. Montgomery is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Plant Biologists, and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Montgomery has received the Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion Award from the American Society of Plant Biologists, Excellence in Supporting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging from the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee, and the 2023 Hutchinson Medal of the Chicago Horticultural Society. Dr. Montgomery is author of Lessons from Plants, and is at work on her second book, When Trees Testify.

Host or Publisher National Book Foundation