Abby Letteri

Public Email   abz@letteri.com
Websitehttps://watchinghorses.substack.com
Xhttps://bsky.app/profile/abbyletteri.bsky.social

Abby completed a PhD in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)in 2025. The hybrid creative/critical nonfiction thesis took the horse in the human world as its central subject, exploring the horse-human relationship, the impacts of domestication, and the lives of domestic, free-living and wild horses today. Perfectly Themselves: Horses in the Human World was published in September 2026 from Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Abby's Masters thesis, down they forgot: a memoir, was published by Lilith House Press in March 2021 and re-released in 2025 by Dog's Tail Press. Abby’s poetry, stories, reviews and essays have appeared in various publications in the US and New Zealand. She divides her time between a small farm on the Otaki River where she lives with dogs and horses, and a home in town with her filmmaker husband. Life without animals is unthinkable to Abby.

Genre:

Skills:

  • Adult Non-Fiction
  • Autobiography / Memoir

Branch:

Wellington

Location:

Wellington

Publications:

down they forgot: a memoir

down they forgot: a memoir

by Abby Letteri

2nd Ed. published by Dog's Tail Press (Wellington NZ)

Original publications date 7 April, 2021, re-released 2025.

ISBN: 979-8-9913374-2-7

 

down they forgot is a memoir of an American childhood and adolescence in the turbulence of the 1960s and 70s, a time of sweeping social and political discontent. Assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, drugs and dropping out all inform this haunting story about personal identity and the consequences of loneliness, despite the passionate and fleeting friendships of youth.

 

“down they forgot is a work of remarkable freshness. I admire the moral and ethical delicacy of the writing, which combines startling candour with this beautifully judged instinct to leave the mystery of personality in place. Abby favours fragments not just because memory seems to work like this but because the sort of hesitancy implied in the form is a great match for the psychology of this memorable family, where silence and looks create their own rich (and richly elusive) vocabulary.”      —Damien Wilkins, International Institute of Modern Letters

Perfectly Themselves: Horses in the Human World

Perfectly Themselves: Horses in the Human World by Abby Letteri

Te Herenga Waka University Press

ISBN:9781776923236
Pages: 352 
Format: Hardback 
Dimensions: 240mm x 170mm 
Publication Date: 10 September 2026

When Abby Letteri first encountered free-living horses, she realised that her whole life she’d been looking at horses without actually seeing them. Wild horses spend their lives building and maintaining social bonds, moving together in synchrony, their communication constant and subtle. In domestication, we isolate them – move them from paddock to stable to yard – separating them from their companions for our convenience, then find them fragile, anxious and difficult to handle.

An immersive and transporting memoir, Perfectly Themselves offers intimate portraits of horses living freely in the company of their own kind, from Aotearoa to the Outer Hebrides, Iceland and Mongolia. Underpinning Letteri’s research is a question sparked by a 33,000-year-old carved horse that seems alive with vitality and ease: what did we once know about horses that we have forgotten?

Part travel narrative, part intellectual inquiry and part personal reckoning, Perfectly Themselves challenges long-held assumptions about human–horse relationships, inviting readers into a more compassionate way of seeing them – not as objects of human desire, but as beings perfect in themselves.

'Endlessly illuminating and stunningly told, this book changes the way we see horses. With descriptive beauty and moral clarity, Abby Letteri sets out new ways of being alongside non-human lives. A profound work.’ —Damien Wilkins