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Stacy Horn

Biography

Stacy Horn

Stacy Horn is a journalist and author of nonfiction books, including DAMNATION ISLAND: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th Century New York and THE RESTLESS SLEEP: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad. Her last book, described on 'The Bowery Boys' podcast as “your page-turning horror read for the summer,” turned out to be excellent preparation for the horror read she was to write next. Mary Roach has hailed her for “combining awe-fueled curiosity with topflight reporting skills,” while others have described her work as “immaculately researched” and “several notched above the typical reporter’s insights.” Horn’s commentaries have been heard on NPR’s "All Things Considered," and she lives in New York City.

Stacy Horn

Books by Stacy Horn

The Killing Fields of East New York: The First Subprime Mortgage Scandal, a White-Collar Crime Spree, and the Collapse of an American Neighborhood
by Stacy Horn - Nonfiction, True Crime

On a warm summer evening in 1991, 17-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin? The answer can be found two decades earlier. A compulsively readable hybrid of true crime and investigative journalism, THE KILLING FIELDS OF EAST NEW YORK reveals how white-collar crime reduced a prospering neighborhood to abandoned buildings and empty lots.

Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York
by Stacy Horn - History, Nonfiction

Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York’s Blackwell’s Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse." Digging through city records, newspaper articles and archival reports, Stacy Horn tells a gripping narrative through the voices of the island’s inhabitants. We also hear from the era’s officials, reformers and journalists, including the celebrated undercover reporter Nellie Bly. DAMNATION ISLAND shows how far we’ve come in caring for the least fortunate among us --- and reminds us how much work still remains.

Waiting for My Cats to Die: A Morbid Memoir
by Stacy Horn - Nonfiction