Dearest friends. Thank you for everything you are doing to make these terrifying times a little less so. I see your efforts and feel deeply grateful for them. Along with community, what is fortifying me these days is art. For…
Dearest community, I write with exciting news! At long, long last:: ART ABOVE EVERYTHING, the book project to which I have devoted the past decade of my life, has both a pub date and a cover:: “Is the all-encompassing quest…
Dearest friends. Next month, I turn the big 5-0. To mark this milestone, I wish to fulfill a lifelong dream of endowing a grant for student journalists at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. Once seeded, TESTIMONIOS…
Join me this summer for a weeklong Creative Nonfiction workshop called WRITING THE BODY, in which we will narrate the wide range of experiences a body can undergo in a lifetime. We will start with an exploration of notions of…
In our pre-Covid world, I would be in South Korea right now. Although I blotted my calendar’s contents with white-out eleven weeks ago, I can still make out SEOUL in today’s box in phantom script. I am growing strangely accustomed…
Feliz 2020, everyone! I hope that your new year is off to a grand start. Just wanted to share the news that All the Agents & Saints has just been released in paperback, and includes a new preface about the borderlands in…
The vaunted travel writer Paul Theroux has just released a mammoth new travelogue about Mexico called ON THE PLAIN OF SNAKES. Here is an excerpt of my review for the Washington Post: ….”Minus a few policemen, nearly everyone Theroux meets…
Yesterday, my family buried our guiding light: Dick “Po” Griest, my father. I spent the last week writing his eulogy. Sharing it with all of our friends and family who gathered yesterday was the great honor of my life. I…
A novel has emerged from the humanitarian crisis at the border. Not only is it an indictment of U.S. immigration policy, but a requiem memorializing every child who has ever lost their right to a childhood. Here is a snippet of…
Charles “Chuck” Whitney joined the Journalism faculty at the University of Texas at Austin my sophomore year there, and I was lucky to land in his first reporting class. He taught with such rigor and panache, he would have been…