Art Above Everything: An Evening with Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Northwest Vista College
Innovation Center at Manzanillo Hall
3535 N. Ellison, San Antonio, TX
Free and open to the public

Celebrate Latinx Heritage Month 2025 with award-winning author Stephanie Elizondo Griest! Moderated by Cecilia Ballí.

Join Gemini Ink on Thursday, September 18th, as we partner with Northwest Vista College to showcase Stephanie Griest and her new book, Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life, which features interviews with women artists from around the world. 

Stephanie will highlight the profiles of several Latina artists featured in Art of Above Everything. She will then sit down for an intimate conversation with journalist Cecilia Ballí about her book, the joys and heartache of women living a creative life, and the reality of being a Latina artist. A live performance and audience Q&A will follow.

Light refreshments will be served. 

See what readers are saying about Stephanie’s book: 

“Art Above Everything is a quest, a cascade of questions, and especially a celebration: of art, of lives dedicated to art, and of the difficult choices such dedication requires. This is required reading for anyone who is compelled to create.”— Kirsten Valdez Quade

“In this brilliant exploration of women’s creativity, Stephanie Elizondo Griest asks over 100 artists, ‘Is art enough?’ Is the visual art, dance, music or writing really worth the sacrifices, misogyny, violence and hardships? From Iceland and India to Cuba and Rwanda, these artists will tell you their answers.”— Ms Magazine

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting writer from the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Her six books include: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; and All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Believer, BBC, VQR, and Oxford American. Her work has won a Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes. Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she has performed as both a Moth storyteller and as a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Visit her website at: www.StephanieElizondoGriest.com

Cecilia Ballí is a writer and journalist who has been writing for magazines for more than twenty years. In 2000, she became the first Latina or Latino writer at Texas Monthly, where she published longform stories and essays as a writer-at-large. She has written extensively about Tejano history and culture, immigration, the sexual killing of young women in Ciudad Juárez, U.S.-Mexican border drug violence, and Mexican military disappearances and torture, among other subjects. She has also published stories in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and Columbia Journalism Review. She began her journalism career as a high school senior writing for her hometown newspaper, The Brownsville Herald, and later worked as an education reporter for the San Antonio Express-News.