Stephanie Elizondo Griest has mingled with the Russian Mafiya, polished propaganda in China, and belly danced with rumba queens in Cuba. These adventures inspired her award-winning memoir Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004) and guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go (Travelers' Tales, 2007). Atria/Simon & Schuster will publish her second memoir, Mexican Enough: My Life Between The Borderlines, in August 2008. She recently won the 2007 Richard J. Margolis Award for Social Justice for her work.

A passionate activist, Griest co-founded the Youth Free Expression Network, an anti-censorship organization for teens that is a program of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) in New York City, and is currently on the board of NCAC. She once logged in 45,000 miles on a 42-state journey across America, documenting history that is generally overlooked in classroom textbooks for a non-profit educational website called The Odyssey. She filed 50 articles, hundreds of photographs, and a dozen video documentaries for an audience of 100,000 K-12 students at www.ustrek.org.

In 2000, Griest was a political reporter at the Austin bureau of the Associated Press, where she covered George W. Bush’s last legislative session as governor and his bid for the presidency. Before that, she edited and taught journalism at China Daily, the English mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, while serving as a Henry Luce Scholar in Beijing. During her three month tenure as a Scotty Reston Fellow at the New York Times, she wrote about male belly dancers, Latina film makers, and dentists who replace canines with fangs. An article she wrote about religious cults for the Washington Post garnered her a spot on the 1996 USA TODAY All Academic First Team. She also covered Seattle's grunge scene for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Austin's drag queens for The Texas Triangle. She contributed to the anthologies Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, 2004), Lengua Fresca: Latinos Writing on the Edge (Mariner Books, 2006), and Go Your Own Way (Seal Press, 2007). Her travel adventures have appeared in Latina Magazine; Bitch Magazine; World Pulse Magazine; Traveler’s Tales: Cuba; Traveler's Tales: A Fork in Her Road; Traveler’s Tales: Turkey; Traveler's Tales: China; Traveler's Tales: Whose Panties are These?; Traveler's Tales: A Woman's Europe; Traveler's Tales: Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why; Traveler's Tales: Best of Traveler's Tales 2004; Travelers' Tales: Best of Women's Travel Writing 2006; Traveler's Tales: Prague and the Czech Republic; Travelers' Tales: Another Women's World; Q Magazine; and Many Mountains Moving.

Her writing hasn't gone unnoticed. She was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year, and has won residencies at Can Serrat in Barcelona, Spain; Blue Mountain Center in New York; the Art Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New York; the Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska; and Ragdale in Lake Forest, Illinois. She has also been a Visiting Writer at the University of Nebraska's MFA Program. Around the Bloc was named "Book of the Year" by the Mayor's Book Club of Austin, Texas; "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. 100 Places Every Woman Should Go won the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation's Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism's "Gold Prize for Best Travel Book" in 2007 and the "Best Travel Book" in the International Latino Book Awards in 2008. 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 has been a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City since 2005.

Griest's foremost love is the open road, and her wanderlust has taken her to 30 countries. The "Red" ones include: Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czech Republic, China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Viet Nam, the German Democratic Republic, Cuba, and Mozambique. She has also traveled throughout Mexico, Colombia, Egypt, and Turkey, and 47 of the United States. Since August of 2006, she has been living nomadically. Three-quarters of her belongings are in storage in Manhattan; the rest is stuffed in her backpack(s).

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 learned 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.

She can be contacted via her mailing list (see red button above) or on Myspace at www.myspace.com/aroundthebloc or on Facebook.