Art Above Everything by Stephanie Elizondo Griest asks the question: “Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it often requires of us?” Throughout her 20s and 30s, inveterate travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest could not help worrying if constantly prioritizing her writing over everything else—from postponing children to living nomadically to save on rent—was leading her to fulfillment or regret. After a break-up and serious health crisis in her early 40s, she turned to other women artists for their perspectives on that perennial question: is art enough? Purchase the book from The Booksmith, our local San Francisco Bookstore.

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. Currently the 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.