Eliza Griswold ’91

Writing for the Greater Good

From liminal spaces, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eliza Griswold ’91 shares her sense of the world.

BY IAN ALDRICH

Eliza Griswold is a writer who cuts across genres and interests. She’s a poet and a journalist who’s explored the war on terror, matters around spiritual faith, and journeys through desolation and catastrophe with equal finesse. Her first book of nonfiction, 2010’s “The Tenth Parallel,” examined the regions of the world where Islam and Christianity clash. Her second, “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” investigated the impact of fracking in Pennsylvania and earned her a 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. A year later, her second collection of poems, the deeply personal “If Men, Then,” was named as one of Vogue’s most anticipated books of 2020.

What’s the connective tissue? Perhaps it’s Griswold’s comfort in exploring the uncomfortable. For her, the most interesting stories, maybe the most important stories, reside in the spaces between worlds.

“I’m interested in liminal spaces,” says Griswold, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker. “I don’t like easy categorization, and I don’t like easy ideas. I’m always looking to complicate what we understand, because the more complicated the picture, the more accurate the picture. Maybe my work would be more popular if I could just write in a more black and white way, but my own ambition is frustrated by my sense of the world.”

While popularity may be subjective, the accolades that have come Griswold’s way are concrete and plentiful. Over a career that has spanned more than two decades, she has reached the pinnacle of her profession. In addition to a Pulitzer, “Amity and Prosperity” earned a Ridenhour Book Prize, and “A Circle of Hope: Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church,” published last year, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Along the way, Griswold has received prestigious fellowships from New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School, while other recognitions— the Rome Prize in Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for nonfiction, and a PEN award for translating “I Am the Beggar of the World” from Pashto — reflect her ability to work across disciplines. Since 2016, she has also served as a distinguished writer in residence at New York University and last year returned to her alma mater, Princeton University, as its director of the Humanities Council’s Program in Journalism.

The seeds for Griswold’s ambitions were no doubt planted in her childhood. Her father, the late Bishop Frank Tracy Griswold III ’55, led a long and trailblazing career with the Episcopal Church. Known for his gentle personality, deft sense of humor and limitless curiosity, Bishop Griswold served as Presiding Bishop, the leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, from 1997 to 2006 and his capacity for inclusiveness helped steer the Episcopal Church through one of its most turbulent periods as he championed the addition of women and gay priests into the fold.

“The household in which I grew up was a lot like St. Paul’s because that’s where my dad really found his spirituality,” says Griswold, whose SPS service has included serving as a form agent and member of the Alumni Horae advisory board. She published some of her first poems in St. Paul’s literary magazine, in collaboration with Eton. “I didn’t grow up in a house in which Christianity was privileged over any other form as closer to God or more authentic or legitimate or anything like that. My dad did yoga at 5:30 every morning on a sheepskin rug. He had some of his first formative experiences spiritually in Native American communities out West during college. There were lots of valid and authentic ways to be spiritual, and the moral sense to be of service was big. That’s why I could not have felt more at home at St. Paul’s. There was a real continuity in what was valuable about being alive.”

Griswold’s path to journalism wasn’t a straight line. At Princeton, she studied creative writing and concentrated her undergraduate thesis on a collection of her own poems. Unsure of her own ability to make it as a writer she moved to New York City after graduation and landed a job as an assistant editor at a literary agency, where in addition to working to working with giants like Mary Karr and Richard Ford, Griswold was exposed to the wider possibilities of building her own career as a writer. Eventually, Griswold’s byline began appearing in publications like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and perhaps most crucially, The Paris Review, whose founding editor, George Plimpton P’94, encouraged her interest in international reporting.

“He had a history and relationships with a lot of people who did that work,” says Griswold. “And for me, it was connected to that element of service I had grown up with. This idea that I can use my writing to help create a greater good. And the place to do that is in the places where people are suffering around the world.”

Today, in addition to her own continued reporting, Griswold is mentoring the next generation of journalists and other storytellers through her work at Princeton.

“We really are living in such profound uncertainty, and we don’t yet know the reality of where we are headed, but the conversations we are having with students about the questions they have about this time is very grounding,” she says. “And our ability to ground ourselves and take a breath right now is actually a form of survival. How do we live the principles that are at the core of our tradition and teach them so they feel practical? We do what’s always been important: We read great writing and reporting, we go out and we talk to people, and we teach how to interview in deep and empathetic ways, and we learn about the dangers of judgment on the page. And that, right now, that feels like a lot.”

At a time when the public’s trust in the media has plummeted while the safety of reporters is under increasing threat, Griswold’s work, both in the classroom and out in the field, feels more essential than ever.