Rough Draft is delighted to celebrate the virtual launch of HORSE GIRLS: Recovering, Aspiring, and Devoted Riders Redefine the Iconic Bond with the book's editor Halimah Marcus and contributors Carmen Maria Machado and Nur Nasreen Ibrahim.
As a child, horses consumed Halimah Marcus’s imagination. When she wasn’t around horses she was pretending to be one, cantering on two legs, hands poised to hold invisible reins. To her classmates, girls like Halimah were known as “horse girls,” weird and overzealous, absent from the social worlds of their peers. When the phrase “horse girl” started appearing in the zeitgeist—tweets about “horse girl energy” and memes about their particular brand of unbridled enthusiasm, playground behavior, and poor fashion choices—Marcus reluctantly recognized herself. So many years after she had stopped riding, she still had unresolved feelings about the sport. Marcus realized there was still so much more to say about women and horses, stories like but also unlike her own.
In HORSE GIRLS, Marcus and a collection of women and nonbinary writers—some of them equestrian professionals, some hobbyists, others who simply aspired to ride—reclaim the “horse girl” stereotype through personal stories that explore privilege, ambition, traditionally feminine and unfeminine desires, domestication, and wildness. On August 11, Marcus, Machado, and Ibrahim will read from their essays and discuss some of the larger issues — such as gender, autonomy, identity, and freedom — that the book examines.
Copies of HORSE GIRLS, signed by Marcus, will be available for store pickup or nationwide shipping beginning August 3, and can be purchased in advance at roughdraftny.com.
ABOUT THE READERS:
Halimah Marcus’s short stories and essays have appeared in One Story, BOMB, the Literary Review, Amazon Original Sto-ries, the Out There podcast, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, the Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She is the executive director of Electric Literature, an innovative digital publishing nonprofit, and the editor in chief of its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, which she cofounded. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in the Catskill region of New York.
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award- winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nur Nasreen Ibrahim is a writer, journalist, and producer. Her fiction and nonfiction have been included in anthologies and collections from Catapult, Hachette India, Platypus Press, The Aleph Review, Salmagundi magazine, and more. She is a two-time finalist of the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction.
Registrants will receive a link to the Zoom event at a later date. Watch your email for more info in the coming weeks!