The San Antonio Book Festival is proud to present “Get Lit with Stephanie Elizondo Griest,” author of All the Angels and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. Elizondo Griest will be joined in conversation by Raúl Lomeli-Azoubel, SABEResPODER Chairman. After audience Q&A, there will be book sales and signing courtesy of The Twig Book Shop. Join us for an evening of stimulating conversation!

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About the author: Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the award-winning author of three travel memoirs: 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 (2017); as well as the best-selling guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go. As a national correspondent for The Odyssey, she once drove 45,000 miles across America, documenting its history. She has won a Hodder Fellowship to Princeton, a Viebranz Professorship to St. Lawrence University, the Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize. A renowned speaker, Stephanie has taught and performed around the globe, and is currently Assistant Professor and Margaret R. Shuping Fellow of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Learn more about Stephanie »

About the book: After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home–only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation’s foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. Before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York/Canada borderlands, the frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In ALL THE AGENTS AND SAINTS, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between.

“The borderlands are a place of power, dissent, art, & hope” – #Latina #author @SElizondoGriest tells @NBCLatino. #AllTheAgentsAndSaints pic.twitter.com/5FvM7GKahq

— Raul A. Reyes (@RaulAReyes) July 11, 2017