By Brian Dunlap

Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s The Evolution of Love, published by L.A. based Rare Bird Books, has been named a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards in the category of Lesbian Fiction. Finalists will be celebrated and winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony and Gala the evening of Monday, June 3, 2019 in New York City.

The Evolution of Love is about a devastating earthquake that has just hit the San Francisco Bay Area, cutting off the outside world completely. When Lily decides to fly from Nebraska to California and make the treacherous journey into the Bay Area to find her sister, she knows she’s headed for a disaster zone, but nothing prepares her for what she finds.

“Those who survived,” the jacket copy reads, “and didn’t evacuate are making shelters, running meals programs, rigging their own technologies―and redefining the very meaning of community. Lily bands together with a couple of feral kids, a steadfast activist, and a bonobo researcher, among others, to forge a new life.”

Bledsoe loves teaching workshops, cooking, traveling anywhere, basketball, doing anything outside, and telling stories. She’s traveled to Antarctica three times, as a two-time recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers in Antarctica Fellowship and once as a guest on the Russian ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov. She is one of a tiny handful of people who have stayed at all three American stations in Antarctica. She has also stayed in a number of field camps, both on the coast and in the Transantarctic mountains, where scientists are studying penguins, climate change, and the Big Bang.

Rare Bird Books is a L..A. based, Publishers Group West-distributed independent publisher of approximately fifty+ books each year in multiple formats, including print, ebook, audiobook, and limited edition.

Congratulations to both Rare Bird Books and Lucy Jane Bledsoe on their 2019 Lambda Literary Award nomination. Check out the full list of nominees here.