Kathryn Wilder's The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman's Heart (Bison Books) is out! Slated for a November 1 release, it is hitting bookstores in the Southwest now, and follows Wilder's first memoir, Colorado Book Award winning Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West. Her essays, including Best American Essays notables, have appeared in The Missouri Review, Terrain.org, High Desert Journal, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere, and have earned her an American Heritage Award and Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, among others. With an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Wilder writes, cowboys, and lives among mustangs in southwestern Colorado.

Told from the unique perspective of a woman, mother, environmentalist, cowboy, and rancher, this work of literary nonfiction conveys the joys, challenges, heartbreaks, and qualms of contemporary ranching in the American West.

On nineteen thousand acres of combined public and private land in southwest Colorado, Kathryn Wilder and her son, with the help of additional family members, run Criollo cattle, a heritage breed that originated in Spain. Smaller by hundreds of pounds than other European breeds, these cows are uniquely adapted to the desert. In The Last Cows Wilder considers whether the integrity of her program—Criollo cattle, holistic management practices, and organically raised, grass-fed-and-finished beef sold through local markets—is enough to support a regenerative relationship between cattle and desert. And as Wilder approaches seventy, she considers how long she can maintain the demanding physical labor and complex schedule that have been part of her life’s work.

In this engaging and thoughtful narrative that blends biology, geology, natural history, and human history into her personal story, Wilder offers an intimate view into the inner workings of a rancher’s heart.