Two More Weeks Until Stephanie Elizondo Griest Appearance on Santa Fe College Campus
June 17, 2016
Globetrotting foreign correspondent. Human rights advocate. Author and editor of creative
nonfiction. Professor. Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute. Racial, gender
and cultural stereotype smasher. Stephanie Elizondo Griest is all of these things
and she is coming to Santa Fe College.
Griest will read from and discuss her work at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Thursday, June 30, 2016, in the lobby of the Fine Arts Hall at the Northwest Campus, 3000 NW 83 Street, Gainesville. Admission is free and everyone is invited to attend. Her visit is organized by Futuros, SF's academic community that focuses on embracing and learning about the perspectives, identities and cultures of U.S. Latinos and Latinas.
In "Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana," Griest describes her four-year, 12-nation tour of the Communist Bloc that shattered her image of what was known as the "Evil Empire." She volunteered at a children's shelter in Moscow, for a propagandist in Beijing, and danced among Havana's rumba queens. The National Association of Travel Journalists named "Around the Bloc" Best Travel Book of the Year in 2004.
Griest grew up in a half-white, half-brown town and family in South Texas. Her book "Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines" describes travels in search of her own cultural identity in her mother's native Mexico. The book illuminates how we may cast off our identities in youth only to search for and reclaim them as adults. "Mexican Enough" won the 2009 PEN Southwest Book Award for Nonfiction.
"All the Agents & Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands," Griest's forthcoming book, focuses on personal, social and policy issues involving our borders with Mexico and Canada. She has explored these issues in articles for "Oxford American" and "Witness" magazines.
Griest has held a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton and a Viebranz Professorship at St. Lawrence University. She has won the Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize. She is currently the Margaret R. Shuping Fellow and Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She offers telephone consultations on publishing and editing and provides private online instruction in writing memoirs.
Since 2005, Griest has been involved with the World Policy Institute, a progressive think tank dedicated to policy research and advocacy on critical world problems.
The website at http://stephanieelizondogriest.com has more information about Griest and her work.
This event is sponsored in part by SF College and the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture and Visit Gainesville, a Tourist Development Tax Grant from the Alachua County Board of County Commissioners in conjunction with the Alachua County Tourist Development Council.
For more information about Griest's appearance at SF College, call Raul Villarreal in the SF Cultural Programs Office, 352-395-5355.
For more information about Futuros, contact Assistant Professor of English Taryne Taylor,taryne.taylor@sfcollege.edu, 352-381-3669.
