About the Author
Stephanie Elizondo Griest has volunteered at children’s shelters in Russia, polished propaganda in China, and belly danced with rumba queens in Cuba. These and other adventures are the subject of her award-winning memoir: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004). She spent much of 2005 traveling throughout Mexico, interviewing undocumented workers and rallying with Zapatistas, and Atria/Simon & Schuster will publish her memoir about it in the spring of 2008. Travelers' Tales will publish her guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go in March 2007.

Her writing hasn't gone unnoticed. She was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year, and was recently offered residencies at the Art Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New York; the Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. Around the Bloc was named "Best Travel Book of 2004" by the National Association of Travel Journalists of America and a "Best Book of 2004" by the San Francisco Chronicle. Griest has also been awarded honors and scholarships from the following organizations: El Andar, USA Today, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Freedom Forum, the Network of Hispanic Communicators, the Headliners Foundation, the Pan-American Golf Writer's Association, Scripps-Howard, the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and the University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism. She was a writer-in-residency at the Ragdale Foundation in 2003, and has been a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at New School University in New York City since 2005.

Griest's foremost love is the open road, and her wanderlust has taken her to 25 countries. The "Red" ones include: Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czech Republic, China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Viet Nam, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba. She has also traveled throughout Mexico, Colombia, Egypt, and Turkey, and 45 of the United States.

Griest graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1997 from the University of Texas at Austin with degrees in journalism and Post-Soviet Studies and earned a certificate of Advanced Russian from the Moscow Linguistics Institute. She studied Spanish at the Ole Language School of Queretaro Mexico and picked up Mandarin on the streets of Beijing. She has studied tribal gypsy belly dance for six years and has performed in China, Mexico, New York, California, and Texas.

For more information about Stephanie visit www.aroundthebloc.com

Visit our previous Mayor's Book Club resource guides online:
Spring 2006: The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
Spring 2005: Writing Austin's Lives by Metro Austin Residents
Spring 2004: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Spring 2003: Holes by Louis Sachar
Spring 2002: Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

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