We are thrilled to reveal the cover for BLACK BEAR, a dazzling memoir about coexisting with bears and a singular meditation on sibling loss from award-winning author and journalist Trina Moyles.
Trina Moyles’ fascination with black bears began at the age of five, when her father, a wildlife biologist in Peace River, Alberta, brought home an orphaned cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. Roaming the shores of the Peace River with her older brother, Trina understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden, and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats present in the siblings’ hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other.
After years working abroad, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout while her brother worked in the oil sands. Just beyond the electrified fence at the fire tower, black bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear—a keystone species who is as subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. At the same time, she searches for common ground with her brother on the land that bonded them.
Impassioned and eloquent, BLACK BEAR is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and non-human species alike, and the imperative to protect wild ecosystems, as well as the people we hold closest.
Trina is represented by Marilyn Biderman.
Congratulations, Trina!