Past Event: Horse Crazy from Coast to Coast with Sarah Maslin Nir & Walter Thompson-Hernández

This conversation was recorded on Wednesday, September 23, 2020. See the full event description below.

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There are over seven million horses in America – not only in rural areas, but also in many cities across the country -- including New York City and Los Angeles.  Two journalists who have explored the surprising world of horses, Sarah Maslin Nir (New York Times) and Walter Thompson-Hernández (New York Times and host of new NPR podcast “CALIFORNIA LOVE”), will sit down for a virtual conversation about their recently published books.  Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman and a World in Love with an Animal (August 2020) explores life-long rider Nir’s personal connection to these animals and profiles of some of the little-known yet intriguing figures involved in the riding world. In The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland (April 2020) Thompson-Hernández takes a look at the Compton Cowboys, a group of Black horseback riders in Compton, CA who continue the little-known western tradition of Black cowboys, while defying stereotypes and forging new connections to their community. The two will discuss the place that horses hold in the American canon -- past, and present -- and the powerful and surprising stories that horses led them to uncover.   

We are excited to partner with Bravo's Book Nook for 10% off when you buy both books -- check it out here!

About the Speakers:
Sarah Maslin Nir is a staff reporter for The New York Times. Nir was a Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for “Unvarnished,” her more than yearlong investigation into New York City’s nail salon industry that documented the exploitative labor practices and health issues manicurists face. Before becoming a staff reporter, Nir freelanced for eleven sections of the paper, traveling to the Alaskan wilderness in search of people who prefer to live in isolation, and to post-earthquake Haiti. She began as the New York Times’s nightlife columnist, covering 252 parties in 18 months, and continued on to a career that has taken her from covering kidnappings by terrorists in Benin, West Africa, to wildfires in California, and everything in between. A born and raised Manhattanite, Nir earned a masters at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and graduated from Columbia University, where she studied politics and philosophy. She is the author of Horse Crazy. She loves horses.

Based in Los Angeles, Walter Thompson-Hernández began his career with the New York Times in 2018 and reports for the paper’s multi-media reporting team covering subcultures and off-beat communities around the world. He has also written for NPR, Fusion, The Guardian, Remezcla, and other media outlets, and has reported from six continents and throughout the United States. He attended the University of Portland and received his Master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. Before working for the New York Times he was enrolled in the U.C.L.A. Chicano Studies Ph.D. program.