“As a pastor’s kid, a reporter for The New Yorker, and a poet, I’ve spent much of my life at the edge of belief, observing how people organize their lives around what they hold sacred.”

—Eliza Griswold

An author of immense talent and versatility, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eliza Griswold is a journalist, poet and translator. “[Writing] with a reporter’s shrewdness and a poet’s grace” (Princeton Humanities Council), her work centers on the complex nexus of religion, politics, human rights, and the environment. Director of Princeton University’s vaunted Program in Journalism, Griswold has been a contributing writer for The New Yorker for over two decades and has written and translated several volumes of poetry.

Deeply committed to journalism’s role in sustaining a healthy democracy, Griswold has been hailed for humanizing divisive social and political issues through compassionate portrayals of the people and communities most affected. Her exacting and immersive journalism teases out the stories behind fraying institutions and communities, offering us urgently needed perspectives on a rapidly evolving world—one of ever greater divides—between the have and have nots, rural and urban disparities, the perception of environmental issues, shifting political identities, and the sea-changes within contemporary faith and spiritual communities.

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America is the product of seven years of exhaustive reporting. Telling the story of fracking’s impact on a small Appalachian town—corporate corruption, environmental devastation, community members falling ill—it charts one woman’s transformation from a struggling single parent into a homegrown activist fighting for justice.

“Amity and Prosperity is at heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies. It has everything but a happy ending: bucolic setting concealing fortune and danger; poor but proud locals who’ve endured sequential boom bust cycles of resource extraction…tough, reluctant victim-heroes…and a courtroom drama, as a tenacious husband-wife legal team takes on the industry and the state…[a] valuable, discomforting book” 

—JoAnn Wypijewski, The New York Times Book Review

Griswold has long sought to understand societies through the lenses of politics, local community, resource scarcity, and faith, but it was growing up in a devout family—her father was the 25th Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church—that made her especially attuned to the politicization of religion and the changes in spiritual seeking in contemporary America.

Her newest, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award and a New York Times Best Book of 2024, provides a timely reflection on a growing pattern of fracture and polarization across foundational American institutions. An intimate chronicle of a close-knit church in Philadelphia as it dissolves amidst idealistic crises, it traces the drift away from traditional organized religion and churchgoing in the wake of modern society’s increasingly divergent belief systems.

“…As the American church and American society remain divided, it’s very much worth reading Griswold’s book, examining our own hearts and asking ourselves a vital question: Are our differences so great that they justify destroying relationships or institutions that are truly good?”

—David French, The New York Times Book Review

Griswold is also the author of Lukas Prize-winning nonfiction bestseller, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which examines the conflicts over religion, nationhood and natural resources that will remake the world in the years to come.

A highly regarded poet, Griswold is a recipient of the Rome Prize for Poetry, a PEN Translation Prize, and is the author of the poetry collections Wideawake Field and If Then, Men, and I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, a collection Afghani women’s folk poems which she translated from Pashto.

Griswold’s writing has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Smithsonian, Granta, The Paris Review and The New Republic. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including from The New America Foundation, Harvard University, Harvard Divinity School, and the Guggenheim Foundation among others. Currently, she is at work on a new book about Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the only Christian hospital in Gaza, which has been in operation since 1882.