We kid, but Eliza Griswold is definitely a writer to watch—and take seriously. In addition to reading from her debut collection of poems, Wideawake Field, Monday night at the Culture Project, she has another book coming out from FSG in the fall, The Tenth Parallel, which she told a Bookslut interviewer examines “the region between that line and the equator itself, from west Africa through southeast Asia, which has historically marked the southern reach of Islam.”
She’s also a Nieman Fellow journalist who’s written feature stories on, among other subjects, the frontlines of Iraq, the radical Islamist insurgency in Bangladesh, cannibalism among Congolese rebels, and what U.S. military are doing in Afghan prisons. And did we mention that some of those poems appeared in the Paris Review, and that we spotted Philip Gourevitch and Lariss Macfarquhar at the book party, extending their congratulations?