Michael P. Branch talks about his book On the Trail of the Jackalope

Although the jackalope is an invention of the imagination, its form was inspired by actual “horned rabbits,” animals with a strange disease that causes them to grow long, dark lumps from their faces and heads which resemble horns. Around the time the two young boys were creating the first fake jackalope in Wyoming, Dr. Richard Shope, a Princeton, New Jersey-based virologist, was making his breakthrough about the cause of the horns: a virus…. thus begins On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World's Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer

Michael P. Branch is a professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches creative nonfiction, American literature, environmental studies, and film studies. An award-winning writer and humorist, Michael is the author of How to Cuss in Western and lives with his wife and two daughters in the western Great Basin Desert, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Range.

Gifford Hartman, 17-year resident of San Francisco, is writer of social critique, historian of liberation movements, and an adult educator who focuses on the intersection of labor and ecology. He guides the circumambulation of Mt. Tam every solstice and equinox, which is where he met Mike Branch.