4/18/13

Award-Winning SLU Visiting Professor is Final Guest for Writers Series

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

CANTON – St. Lawrence University Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing Stephanie Elizondo Griest will conclude the yearlong Writers Series and read from her recent work on Thursday, April 25, at 8 p.m. in the Common Room of Sykes Residence Hall. The event is open to the public, free of charge.

Griest has taught and performed around the globe. She has mingled with the Russian Mafia, polished Chinese propaganda and danced with Cuban rumba queens. These adventures inspired her award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; and the guidebook, 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. She has taught at more than a dozen writers conferences as well as at literary organizations like Media Bistro, 826 Valencia, Gemini Ink, and Grub Street.

A passionate activist, Griest co-founded the Youth Free Expression Network, an anti-censorship organization for teens that is a program of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) in New York City. She has been a national correspondent for The Odyssey, a nonprofit educational website, and has won a Hodder Fellowship to Princeton University, a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize.

Griest graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism and post-Soviet studies and received her M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa.