About Ali
Alexandra Oliva — Ali, for short — grew up in a tiny town in New York's Adirondack Mountains. Her last name is pronounced "all of a," like the first three words of the phrase “all of a sudden.”
Photo: Folrev Photography
One of the first members of her family to attend college, Ali left the Adirondacks for Yale University in 2001. There she made some of the best friends of her life, failed to learn Russian, and wrote a very long essay about Robin Hood, which earned her a B.A. in History.
After Yale, Ali lived in Ireland briefly before moving to New York City, where she waited tables, worked as a private tutor, met her husband online, learned to rock climb, volunteered at a zoo, and received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School.
During this time, Ali also wrote two novels that she now refers to as her “practice novels,” though she didn’t know that's what they were at the time. While gathering rejection letters for the second of these, she had the idea for The Last One.
To pull off a novel combining a survival reality show with the apocalypse, Ali knew she needed to get her hands dirty. After gathering her courage, she signed up for a fourteen-day field course with the Boulder Outdoor Survival School (B.O.S.S.) — which is known for providing some of the most authentic and challenging wilderness survival and primitive living experiences in the world.
Ali and her husband soon flew to Utah for the course, where they hiked out into the desert with expert guidance and minimal supplies. It was a difficult and amazing experience — and one that was integral to her writing The Last One.
In 2014, Ali and her husband moved to the Pacific Northwest and got a high-strung, brindled puppy they named Codex. Ali met her literary agent that summer and sold The Last One in early 2015, a whirlwind experience. In 2016, a few months before her debut's publication, she returned to Utah and earned her Wilderness First Responder certification — another experience she undertook primarily as novel research, this time for a near-future literary thriller that would ultimately be titled Forget Me Not.
In 2017, Ali's family grew by one small human, a son whose arrival both delayed and enriched her writing. Eventually, her son learned how amazing sleep is, and Ali was able to finish Forget Me Not, which was published in March 2021. She is now working on a new novel, which hopefully won’t take quite so long.