Two New York Times journalists share how memoir writing can help heal trauma during Sept. 21 Institute program

Join New York Times journalists Sarah Maslin Nir and Rukmini Callimachi for a National Press Club Journalism Institute conversation on how memoir writing can transform trauma into healing. 

Registration is open now for this free online program, which is scheduled  to take place on Monday, Sept. 21, from 11:30 a.m. to noon.

In a departure from her typical beat as a New York Times journalist, Nir has turned her reporter’s eye on herself in her new book, Horse Crazy, the story of a woman and a world in love with an animal, which unpacks her and others’ obsession with horses. Nir began riding horses as a 2-year-old but it wasn’t until she started writing a memoir about her passion that she realized the role they played in helping her heal from trauma. 

“Without knowing it,” horses have “been saving me my whole life,” Nir told People magazine. They have even helped her heal after her COVID-19 diagnosis. 

Nir and Callimachi plan to discuss:

• How to reveal (or not reveal) “the personal stuff” as a journalist; 

• Writing as an outsider – Black cowboys, Breonna Taylor and equity; and

• Publishing during a pandemic.

Nir has been a staff reporter for the New York Times since August 2011. She currently covers regional news for the paper’s Metro section. Before that, Nir was a beat reporter covering the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. She 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, in two parts, the exploitative labor practices and health issues manicurists face. From 2010 until the end of 2011,  she was the Times’s “Nocturnalist” columnist, covering New York City’s nightlife. Before becoming a staff member, she freelanced for 11 sections of the paper, traveling to the Alaskan wilderness, in search of people who prefer to live in isolation, and to post-earthquake Haiti. Horse Crazy is her first book. 

Callimachi joined the New York Times in March 2014 as a foreign correspondent, covering Al Qaeda and ISIS. She is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, including in 2014 for her series of stories based on a cache of internal Qaeda documents she discovered in Mali. She is also the winner of the George Polk Award for International Reporting, multiple Overseas Press Club Awards and the Michael Kelly prize. Before joining the Times, Callimachi spent seven years covering a 20-country beat in Africa, first as a correspondent and later as West Africa bureau chief for the Associated Press. She began her career as a freelancer in India in 2001, where she was lucky enough to get one of the last seats on a plane to the state of Gujarat on the day of a catastrophic earthquake, filing her first story for Time magazine.