Background

Stephanie Griest was born on June 6, 1974, Corpus Christi, Texas, United States.

Education

Stephanie Griest studied at the University of Texas, Austin, where she received degrees in Journalism and post-Soviet Studies in 1997.

Career

Beginning in 1996, Griest pursued her dream to become a foreign correspondent by traveling to Moscow with a group of students. There she learned the language and began her four-year tour of twenty-one countries, twelve of them in the Communist bloc. She went to Beijing, where she worked for the English-language version of China Daily, and on another occasion, she visited Cuba.

A dedicated teacher, Griest has taught at more than a dozen writer’s conferences as well as at literary organizations like Media Bistro, 826 Valencia, Gemini Ink, and Grub Street. From 2010 to 2012, she taught creative nonfiction to undergraduates at the University of Iowa as a Dean’s Graduate Fellow, and during the 2012-2013 academic year, she served as the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Saint Lawrence University. In fall 2013, she became Assistant Professor and Margaret Shuping Fellow of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and was awarded tenure in spring 2018.

Griest co-founded the Youth Free Expression Network, an anti-censorship organization for teens that is a program of the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York City. She once logged in 45,000 miles on a 42-state journey across America, documenting a history that is generally overlooked in classroom textbooks for a non-profit educational website called The Odyssey. She filed 50 articles, hundreds of photographs, and a dozen video documentaries for an audience of 100,000 K-12 students.

As a journalist, Griest was a political reporter at the Austin bureau of the Associated Press, where she covered George W. Bush’s last legislative session as governor and his bid for the presidency. Before that, she edited and taught journalism at China Daily while serving as a Henry Luce Scholar in Beijing. During her three month tenure as a Scotty Reston Fellow at the New York Times, she wrote about male belly dancers and dentists who replace canines with fangs. An article she wrote about religious cults for the Washington Post garnered her a spot on the 1996 USA TODAY All-Academic First Team. She also covered Seattle’s grunge scene for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has contributed to the anthologies Bookmark Now, Lengua Fresca, Go Your Own Way and countless others.

Achievements

• Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of the award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc, Mexican Enough and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go and many periodical articles. She also traveled through forty-two stales gathering history for the nonprofit, educational Web site Odyssey.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Around the Bloc

    (In Around the Bloc, Griest relates her experiences as a v...)

    2004
  • All the Agents and Saints

    (After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intre...)

    2017
  • 100 Places Every Woman Should Go

    (With its breezy reviews and insightful advice, 100 Places...)

    2007
  • Mexican Enough

    (Growing up in a half-white, half-brown town and family in...)

    2008

Membership

• 

  Stephanie Griest is a Macondista of Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Workshop since 2009.

  Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Workshop , United States

  2009 - present

• 

  Stephanie Griest is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 2013.

  Texas Institute of Letters , United States

  2013 - present

• 

  Stephanie Griest is a member of the National Book Critics Circle since 2018.

  National Book Critics Circle , United States

  2018 - present

• 

  Stephanie Griest is a member of the PEN Society since 2008.

  PEN Society , United States

  2008

References

• Contemporary Authors vol. 233