Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephanie Elizondo Griest.
Hi Stephanie, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
How did I get to be a travel writer? My father was a member of the US Navy Jazz Band who drummed his way around the world. My mother descends from cowboys who migrated from Mexico to the cattle ranches of South Texas more than a century ago. So wanderlust is literally encoded in my DNA! My senior year in high school, I attended a journalism conference that featured a rockstar CNN correspondent who had covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. His stories marveled me. When he finished, I ran up to the microphone and asked how I could be a foreign correspondent like him. He said “Learn Russian.” So, I signed up for Russian classes when I enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, and four years later jetted off to Moscow. I’ve been a travel writer ever since, to 50 countries and every state but Delaware. My six books that have sprung from those adventures include: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. I moved to the Triangle in 2013 to become Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In addition to mentoring the next generation of writers, I have spent my time in Carolina working on my just-published book, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life. It examines the sacrifices women make to be artists, and what it means to place our ambitions at the core of our existence. I will be spending the rest of 2025 on a 28-city book tour, and hope to see you all on the road!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Writing is an incredibly challenging career, not just emotionally but financially. I made a lot of sacrifices in my twenties and thirties to work on my books. Health insurance was the first to go. Then my Brooklyn apartment, followed by three-fourths of my belongings (well, they went into storage). In order to promote my second book and write my third, I became a full-fledged nomad. Neither AirBnB nor Uber had been invented yet, so I crashed on people’s couches and took public transportation everywhere. One year, I traveled to more than 40 cities and (briefly) resided in five! That was exhausting, but the joy of living my dream generally justified the sacrifices. And so, I persisted.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My writing is a fusion of travel writing, literary journalism, and memoir. What sets me apart is the length I will go to for a project. For my first book, Around the Bloc, I studied Russian and Mandarin and spent years living and working and traveling in the post-communist bloc. For my second book, Mexican Enough, I quit my job and put everything in storage in order to roam around Mexico for a year, interviewing everyone whose path I crossed and reconnecting with my ancestral heritage. And for All the Agents and Saints and Art Above Everything, I interviewed more than 100 people per book, in their homes, offices, and studios in locations ranging from the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne to Qatar, India, Romania, Iceland, and the Maori homeland of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I am proudest of the fact that I never give up, and that I maintain the friendships I make along the way.
Any big plans?
I am thrilled to be spending the next year on an extended book tour for Art Above Everything. I will be traveling to 28 cities (and counting!) in the United States, Mexico, and Poland on tour. Nothing gives me more joy than sharing the stories of the incredible people I’ve encountered in my travels.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.StephanieElizondoGriest.com
- Instagram: @SElizondoGriest
