FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 6, 2007
Contact: ,
Austin Public Library,
(512) 974-7528
Fax: (512) 974-7442

6^th Annual Mayor’s Book Club
to Keep Austin Reading Launches with a
First Time Selection of Female Author

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Austin, Texas (February 6, 2007)-The sixth annual selection of the “Mayor’s Book Club” was announced today at a press conference at the Austin City Store, City Hall in downtown Austin. The book selected by the mayor for the “Keep Austin Reading” campaign is Around the Bloc, a travel memoir written by a Latina author, Stephanie Elizondo Griest. In Around the Bloc, Stephanie begins her travel memoir in Russia. At 21 she sets off for Moscow with some fellow Texas college students in an attempt to strengthen her Russian language ability, and deepen her understanding of Russian Culture. Her four year travels then take her to China and Cuba and 12 other nations. “We felt in choosing this book that it was timely subject matter as we explore America’s role in the world, and our perceptions of foreign peoples and cultures and their perceptions of us,” says Mayor Wynn. “It is a well written book by a youthful voice. It’s our hope that the book will appeal to high school and college students because of it’s youthful perspective.” This book is a wonderful first book by Griest and is a coming of age odyssey. The book can be checked out at all Austin Public Library locations and purchased at local bookstores.

The Library, in conjunction with the Mayor’s office and the University of Texas Humanities Institute, launches its annual citywide reading campaign to develop a community experience through reading and discussion of a shared book. We invite all of Austin to read the book in February and March and then join together in special events and programs in April 2007. At the culmination of the reading campaign, we will host the award winning author in a special event on April 17, 2007.

Partners of the citywide reading program are the City of Austin, the University of Texas Humanities Institute and area bookstores. Sponsors of this year’s Mayor’s Book Club include Texas Gas Service, the Austin Public Library Foundation and the Friends of the Austin Public Library. For additional information about the Mayor’s Book Club call (512) 974-7400 or visit www.cityofaustin.org/library.

About the Author
Accolades for “Around the Bloc”

• Won “Best Travel Book of the Year” Award from the National Association of Travel Journalists of America for 2004
• Named a “Substantial Book Read” by National Public Radio, Summer 2005
• Named a “Best Book of 2004” by the San Francisco Chronicle on December 12, 2004
• Featured in the New York Times Book Review’s Recommended Summer Reading edition on June 6, 2004
• Featured in USA Today
• Named Texas Monthly’s “Book of the Month” for March 2004
• Named an Editor’s Pick/Summer Beach Book by MSN Shopping
• Named a “Bitch Read” by Bitch Magazine for Summer 2004

Stephanie Elizondo Griest has volunteered at children’s shelters in Russia, polished propaganda in China, and belly danced with rumba queens in Cuba. These and other adventures are the subject of her award-winning memoir: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004). She spent much of 2005 traveling throughout Mexico, interviewing undocumented workers and rallying with Zapatistas, and Atria/Simon & Schuster will publish her memoir about it in the spring of 2008. Travelers’ Tales will publish her guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go in March 2007.

Her writing hasn’t gone unnoticed. She was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year, and was recently offered residencies at the Art Omi International Arts Center in Ghent, New York; the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. Around the Bloc was named “Best Travel Book of 2004” by the National Association of Travel Journalists of America and a “Best Book of 2004” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Griest has also been awarded honors and scholarships from the following organizations: El Andar, USA Today, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Freedom Forum, the Network of Hispanic Communicators, the Headliners Foundation, the Pan-American Golf Writer’s Association, Scripps-Howard, the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism. She was a writer-in-residency at the Ragdale Foundation in 2003, and has been a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at New School University in New York City since 2005.

Griest graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1997 from the University of Texas at Austin with degrees in journalism and Post-Soviet Studies and earned a certificate of Advanced Russian from the Moscow Linguistics Institute. She studied Spanish at the Ole Language School of Queretaro Mexico and picked up Mandarin on the streets of Beijing. She has studied tribal gypsy belly dance for six years and has performed in China, Mexico, New York, California, and Texas.

Visit our previous Mayor's Book Club resource guides online:
Spring 2006: The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
Spring 2005: Writing Austin's Lives by Metro Austin Residents
Spring 2004: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Spring 2003: Holes by Louis Sachar
Spring 2002: Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya

To view what other cities across the country are reading visit
The Center for the Book