About Ali

Alexandra Oliva — Ali, for short — grew up in a tiny town in New York's Adirondack Mountains. Her last name is pronounced like the first three words of the phrase “all of a sudden.”

Ali left the Adirondacks for Yale University in 2001 and is a first-generation college graduate. After college, she lived in Ireland briefly before moving to New York City, where she waited tables, met her husband, volunteered at a zoo, and received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from The New School.

During this period, Ali 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, she knew she needed to get her hands dirty, so Ali signed up for a fourteen-day field course with the Boulder Outdoor Survival School (B.O.S.S.) It was a difficult and amazing experience — and one that was integral to her writing the story she wanted to write. 

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 (now lapsed) 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.

In the years since then, she has been focused on her latest novel, The Radiant Dark, which will be released in April 2026. Research for this one included an incredible  week-long astronomy bootcamp (The Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop), and it’s been a doozy to write. She cannot wait to share it with the world.