Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and the recipient of the 2015 Whiting Award in nonfiction. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Iowa Review, among other publications, as well as in the anthologies Cat is Art Spelled Wrong, After Montaigne, and I’ll Tell You Mine. Her first essay collection, Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande), won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards and was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. Sarabande will publish her next collection, Animals Strike Curious Poses, in 2017. She teaches in the MFA program at Oregon State University.