Writer and actor Elena Passarello is the author of Animals Strike Curious Poses, which won the 2018 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Let Me Clear My Throat, which won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. Recently, she collaborated with photographer, Kevin Horan, in the artist book: Goats & Sheep: A Portrait Farm. Passarello has performed in several regional theaters in the East and Midwest, including Christopher Durang’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge and David Turkel’s Wild Signs and Holler. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction, and The Iowa Review, among other publications.