JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER,
THE TENTH PARALLEL (2010)

NYS Writers Institute, September 27, 2011
4:15 p.m. Seminar | Assembly Hall, Campus Center
8:00 p.m. Reading | Assembly Hall, Campus Center

CALENDAR LISTING:
Eliza Griswold, journalist and author of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (2010), will read from her work on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 8:00 p.m. in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that day at 4:15 p.m., the author will present an informal seminar in the same location. The events are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, and are free and open to the public.

PROFILE
Eliza Griswold is the author of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (2010), an exploration of diverse societies that are situated near the line of latitude where the world’s two largest religions meet and collide. In writing the book, Griswold spent seven years travelling the narrow 700-mile band between the tenth parallel and the equator where more than half the world’s Muslims and sixty percent of the world’s Christians reside. Arranged into geographical sections and chapters, the book presents vivid accounts of daily life and recent historical events as experienced by Christians, Muslims, and the author herself in the African nations of Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia, and in the Southeast Asian nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

In praise, Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “Griswold’s courageous pilgrimage changes the way we think about Christianity and Islam…. She returns us to the most basic truth of human existence: that the world and its people are interconnected.”  Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Linda Robinson said, “The Tenth Parallel is a beautifully written book, full of arresting stories woven around a provocative issue — whether fundamentalism leads to violence — which Griswold investigates through individual lives rather than caricatures or abstractions. In this tropical region where monsoons and jungles give way to desert, she looks at how history, resources, climate and demographic trends have combined with and shaped the struggle among religions.”

A former Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, Griswold has covered cultural and military conflicts throughout Africa and Asia. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States.