Kelly Oliver is the author of THE JESSICA JAMES COWGIRL PHILOSOPHER MYSTERY novels, including WOLF, COYOTE, and F.O.X. (2017). She was born on July 28, 1958 in Spokane Washington, went to University High School in Spokane Valley, graduated from Gonzaga University with honors in 1979 with a double major in philosophy and communications, and earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in philosophy in 1987. She has held teaching positions at various Universities, including George Washington University, University of Texas at Austin, and Stony Brook University. Currently, she is W. Alton Jones Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.She has published books on topics ranging from family, love, war, and violence to affirmative action, Hollywood films, and animal rights.Her nonfiction work includes over 100 articles and over twenty books, including: Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape; Earth and World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions; Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment; Knock me up, Knock me down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film; Animal Lessons: How They Teach us to be Human; Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media; The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression; Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex, and Maternity in Film Noir; Witnessing: Beyond Recognition; Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers; Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture; Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to "the Feminine"; and Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. She has edited or co-edited several books.