Stephanie Elizondo Griest to Present New Book at Akwesasne Cultural Center

Stephanie Elizondo Griest, the award-winning author of three travel memoirs will be presenting her latest book, "All the Agents & Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands" at the Akwesasne Library on Tuesday, March 27 from 4:40 to 6:30pm. Griest's travel memoirs include: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines. She is also author of the best-selling guidebook "100 Places Every Woman Should Go". She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, VQR, and Oxford American, and edited Best Women's Travel Writing 2010. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed across the globe.

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull to her 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 here, she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Mohawk 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."

She writes about the toxic industries surround our neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of local artists and activists devoted to preserving our 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.

You can visit her website at StephanieElizondoGriest.com.