Kathryn Wilder, author of Desert Chrome, will be in conversation with Laura Pritchett.
About Desert Chrome: Lost in grief, Kathryn Wilder finds her way back to the Colorado Plateau, where mustangs--whose presence and management remain controversial in the West--help her connect to desert and self.
KATHRYN WILDER's work, cited in Best American Essays and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared in such publications as High Desert Journal, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Sierra, and many anthologies and Hawai'i magazines. A past finalist for the Ellen Meloy Fund Desert Writers Award and the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, Wilder holds an MA from Northern Arizona University and an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives among mustangs in southwestern Colorado.
A raw and honest journey of addiction, love, trauma, and redemption--grounded in a deep love of place and all things mustang. The best memoirs reveal the deeply personal in order to see the larger world with renewed clarity and insight--this is one such book. As Wilder moves from heroin to horses, we see a substantive journey of recovery and strength--and ultimately, of resilience. -- LAURA PRITCHETT, author of Stars Go Blue
Wilder's love of horses and the land is the theme threaded through her, and her writing makes a heartsong of it all. -- LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, author of Verge
For too long, the lone cowboy myth has corralled the American West in the barbed wires of dominion and destruction. Tangled in that telling are women and mustangs--their wildness, togetherness, and vulnerability. In Desert Chrome, Kathryn Wilder bucks against a story as desiccated as the deserts she has dwelled in--kicking hard enough to free what was bound, to redeem what was broken. Listen now, to the thundering of hearts and hooves. They're coming for us, at last. -- AMY IRVINE, author of Air Mail and Desert Cabal
I learned so much reading Kathryn Wilder's book, Desert Chrome--about wild horses. About desert and water. About Kat. We were neighbors years ago, but the new paths along which, with smooth and stunning prose, she leads readers into the depths of her life suggest how little we know those close to us. And how huge life can be once we commit with our whole hearts to wildness. -- BROOKE WILLIAMS, author of Open Midnight
