A. Kendra Greene is the author and illustrator of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. At eighteen, she interned at Chile’s national zoo because there was no more sensible place to send a philosophy major. She became an essayist during a Fulbright in South Korea while she was supposed to be making photographs. She has an MFA in nonfiction and a graduate certificate in book arts from the University of Iowa, where she was both a Jacob K. Javits fellow and costumer to a giant ground sloth. She’s been the writer in residence at the Dallas Museum of Art, and longtime guest artist at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the American Library in Paris, and Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab. She has lent her voice to audiobooks, radio broadcasts, and anime Amazons. Briefly a high school math and science teacher, she has since taught creative writing, with a bent for text and image and object, at the University of Iceland, UNC Chapel Hill, and UT Dallas. She finished this book after a season on the historic Dobie Paisano Ranch, surrounded in equal measure by critters and the sheer mythos of Texas, which is to say, close enough to the lions of the Austin Zoo to hear them at twilight, roaring or talking or yawning, depending on who you ask.