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One Woman's Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life
by Stephanie Elizondo Griest
Meet queer, BIPOC, and women artists around the world as they discuss the gifts, costs, and redemptive power of pursuing a creative life.
Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it often requires? Throughout her 20s and 30s, 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 decided to turn to other women artists for their perspectives on that perennial question: is art enough?
Art Above Everything introduces us to legendary writers, visual artists, dancers, and musicians across the globe, who talk intimately about their art, what it requires, what it gifts them, and what it costs them. Opening in a classical Indian dance village, Elizondo Griest goes on to meet 100+ artists in Rwanda, Romania, Qatar, Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, Cuba, and the United States. She discovers artists from Rwandan playwright Hope Azeda, who navigated ethnic tensions as she attempted to bring about reconciliation through theater in the aftermath of genocide; to Romanian painter Florica Prevenda, who got assigned to a provincial factory during Ceaușescu's dictatorship but never relinquished her brushes.
Art is inheritance, dissent, devotion, revenge, celebration, and more. Yet though each artist's relationship to their craft is different, their need to create in the face of economic hardship, misogyny, sexual violence, and family ostracization is wholly akin.
Bold and inspiring, Art Above Everything never pretends that the artist's path is easy—but it illuminates the infinite ways we can wield creativity as a vitalizing force.
"[An] inspiring account...A potent testament to the value of pursuing one's passion." —Publishers Weekly
"Readers may wish they'd had this guide at the start of their own journeys, but it's never too late to be reminded that yes, the road is impossible, and no, you're not on it alone. A new kind of travel writing." —Booklist
"This book is a must-read for every woman artist! It will affirm the decisions you have made, inspire you to get back to the page or the canvas or the studio, and clarify that you belong to a glorious and global lineage of creatives. In chapter after chapter, you will, as I did, travel around the world with Stephanie Elizondo Griest as she interviews 'art monks'—women who have dedicated their entire lives to an art form. Her lucid and lyrical reportage, coupled with memoir, left me riveted and articulated for me the many ways that we navigate the ecstasies of making art and the practicalities of paying the rent. This is a book to devour and to give to your best friend!" —Daisy Hernández, coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism
"Sensitive and gorgeously curious, 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." —Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds
This information about Art Above Everything was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stephanie Elizondo Griest is a globetrotting author from South Texas. 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 a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Prize. She currently serves as a professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
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