Reclaiming the Dream…….

About the Book

By knowing the past, you can understand the present and predict the future. This is a tale of amazing horses, and unbelievable human behavior. A rare breed’s struggle for identity is at the core of this story. Lifted, by an American couple in the 1990’s, from an environment steeped in cultural prejudice, the horses’ thirty year journey to be understood and proclaimed a new standardized breed has been riddled with every possible obstacle the horse industry could present. Joyce M. Christian, “The Gypsy Vanner Lady” takes you on that thirty-year journey; unravels the twists and turns and makes the bold prediction that if finally understood as a standardized breed this horse will make its mark on the horse industry at large. Join the author as she presents the horses, the people, the events, and you, the reader, be the judge, does she make the case for the Gypsy Vanner Horse?

About the Author

Joyce M. Christian is first and foremost an educator. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Education and a Master of Arts in Curriculum Development and Supervision from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. She enjoyed a thirty year career with the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA). She lived and worked in Germany for twenty-three years and completed her career with the DoDEA at the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York from 2001until her retirement in 2009. In 1998 she began communicating with Dennis and Cindy Thompson, the Co-Founders of the Gypsy Vanner Horse Society. Ms. Christian’s work with the horse and on behalf of the breed registry has been nonstop since that moment in time. In the early years after returning to the states she became a prolific writer for the registry with articles appearing in Equine Journal, Just Horses, American Livestock Magazine, and she has been quoted in Horse Illustrated. She is also the Founding Editor of The Vanner magazine, the official publication for the Gypsy Vanner Horse Society. Over the course of the last thirty years Ms. Christian’s passion for this horse has driven her to research, record, and present her findings not only as a recognized author and breed historian, but as a presenter about the Gypsy Vanner Horse. In addition to speaking at several events in the USA, in 2018 she was invited to Bogota, Colombia and presented a breed development seminar. She was then invited to return in 2019 to Medellin, Colombia to present at their Agricultural Expo. In the last ten years she has been very active on social media, especially via Facebook. She shares her thoughts, takes her followers back to wonderful moments in the history of these horses, and is unashamedly blunt in expressing her fear of the breed’s threatened future. She signs her posts, “The Gypsy Vanner Lady”. Her overarching goal remains to continue the legacy begun by Cindy Thompson seeing it through to its greatest potential: the Gypsy Vanner Horse understood, recognized and applauded as a standardized breed worldwide.