About Haley

I am the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative and the author of A Flower Traveled in My Blood, a narrative nonfiction history of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.

The Abuelas’ story has captivated me since 2011, when I moved to Buenos Aires shortly after graduating from college. As I read more about Argentina’s last dictatorship, I was completely shocked to learn that, among the thousands of Argentines the military disappeared during that period, were hundreds of pregnant women. I remember the nausea that spread over me as I read about how pregnant women were detained, held until they gave birth, and sometimes pushed out of planes over the Río de la Plata soon after having their babies. Their children, meanwhile, were often sent to live in the homes of military and police officers under false identities. Despite the immense danger, the grandmothers of these stolen babies refused to relent—boldly protesting in front of the presidential palace to demand answers, disguising themselves to observe children they suspected might be their relatives, and pioneering new genetic methods to identify them.

I devoured all the material I could find about the Abuelas and their grandchildren, but I found there was only one book on the subject in English. It was thorough and compelling, but it had been published in 1999 and was more of a scholarly examination than a narrative history of the type I hoped to read. It did not yet cross my mind to try to write one myself.

After living in Argentina for a few months, I was offered the chance to work as The Economist’s correspondent for Argentina and Uruguay, based in Buenos Aires. For the next four years, I had the most fun a journalist can possibly have while still calling it work. One week I might visit the trading floor of a soybean exchange, the next I would find myself in a paddock, surrounded by cloned polo horses. The only downside was that the job kept me busy–too busy to take on any substantive side work.

But I never forgot the Abuelas and their stolen grandchildren and, years later, when I had returned to the United States, their story came flooding back to me. By then, I had left The Economist to focus on feature writing and had more bandwidth to pursue longer projects. I began talking to friends, many of whom studied history, as I did, and was surprised by how few were familiar with the Abuelas and their stolen grandchildren. The book I’d wanted to read back in 2011, I now desperately wanted to write.

Telling the Abuelas’ story was daunting. By the time I began reporting, many of the Abuelas had grown very old. Rosa Roisinblit, one of the main subjects of this book, was 102 when I connected with her. But on the days when the challenge felt insurmountable, it was Rosa’s words that powered me forward, searching for archival material and legal transcripts to fill in any blanks. All I had to do to write a gripping narrative, I reminded myself, was to report until I could recount the Abuelas’ history as it had happened. Or as Rosa told me, sitting in her living room in 2021: “The truth, before everything.”

Before reporting A Flower Traveled in My Blood, I focused on the American West and feature magazine writing.

After packing my suitcases (mostly with jars of dulce de leche) and leaving Argentina in 2015, I spent three more years at The Economist — in London, writing for the international desk, and eventually Los Angeles, where I covered California and the American West. I worked hard—writing a cover story on how to harness the talents of adults on the autism spectrum—and had lots of fun, road-tripping through newly formed national monuments and reporting from inside the frigid bowels of cryotherapy chambers. (Regarding the sorry picture in that last piece, there's a moral to the story: establish ground rules before sending your editor embarrassing reporting photos.)

But over time, I began itching to tell stories that might inspire empathy and wonder as well as thought. In 2018, I decided to go freelance to do just that.

I have trekked through the Amazon to write about bizarre insects for National Geographic, marveled at pastures full of cloned polo horses for Vanity Fair, and sped along the St. Lawrence River with professional bass fishermen for The New York Times. (And I thought I had a cool job.) For Outside Magazine, I have retraced the epic histories of two rock climbers whose deaths hold lessons about how to live and profiled “The Bite Club”, a support group for shark attack survivors. I have written about a tiny rocket company with big ambitions and the race to replicate breastmilk in a lab for MIT Technology Review, two dogged American lawyers trying to hunt down Ferdinand Marcos’s pilfered fortune for Bloomberg Businessweek, and inmates who tame wild horses for 1843.

These stories might seem disparate, but they share a common theme: They’re all about people consumed by obsession—whether with a sport, an idea, a desire to change, or a drive to make change. My own passion is finding, reporting, and sharing true stories that educate readers about important themes and events while entertaining them at the same time. I feel very lucky to spend my days doing such work.

When I’m not talking to students, writing, or casting hexes on my blank screen as I attempt to write, you can find me chasing after my young daughters or tramping through the woods with my equally unruly husband and pups. (Click the link. In their defense, it is a very sad book.)