MEMPHIS, Tenn. – At Rhodes College on Oct.18 at 7 p.m., author Stephanie Elizondo Griest will give a book reading and lecture based on her most recent book, “All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands.”
The event will take place in Hardie Auditorium and will be preceded by a reception beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Griest will remark on her motivations for writing the book and share her perspective on the current immigration crisis in the U.S.
This event is free and open to the public as part of the college’s “Communities in Conversation” lecture series. It is sponsored by the Department of English and the Latin American and Latinx Studies program.
In a striking comparison between two different borderlands in the U.S., Griest combines several immigration narratives to tell a story of the lives of individuals who reside in between cultures.
Griest is a travel writer who spent many years away from her hometown in southern Texas. The town she finds upon her return home has been irreparably changed by the mass migration of undocumented persons and the militarization of those groups by the U.S. government. After returning home, Griest spent time at the U.S./Canadian borderlands in New York. Griest could not ignore the striking similarities between the experiences of Tejanos in Texas and Mohawks in New York.
The book highlights the work being done in the borderlands by artists and activists who seek to preserve their indigenous culture. Griest’s writing confronts ideas of identity and a sense of belonging in a modern world that is constantly changing and increasingly unstable.
Griest is an assistant professor of creative non-fiction at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been awarded “Best Travel Book of 2004” by the National Association of Travel Journalists of America. Griest’s book Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines won the PEN Southwest Book Award for Nonfiction. For All the Agents and Saints, Griest was a finalist for the 2018 International Latino Book Awards.
