Stephanie Elizondo Griest, an award-winning author and professor of creative nonfiction at UNC Chapel Hill, shares her new book Art Above Everything: One Woman's Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life, a sweeping exploration of the sacrifices women artists make to pursue their work across borders, disciplines, and decades.

This book is a must-read for every woman artist! It will affirm the decisions you have made, inspire you to get back to the page or the canvas or the studio, and clarify that you belong to a glorious and global lineage of creatives... [Griest's] lucid and lyrical reportage, coupled with memoir, left me riveted and articulated for me the many ways that we navigate the ecstasies of making art and the practicalities of paying the rent.”
Daisy Hernández, coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from South Texas. Her 6 books include: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the US Borderlands. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, VQR, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize. She currently serves as a professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.