Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, translator, and poet Eliza Griswold has been named director of the Humanities Council’s Program in Journalism at Princeton. Her appointment will take effect August 1.

For more than two decades, Griswold has been a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where she has extensively covered religion, politics, and the environment. Since 2016, she has served as a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

“We are delighted to have Eliza Griswold join us this fall. Courageous and compassionate, deeply rooted in the humanities, she is a writer who brings the world’s lives into our own,” said Humanities Council Chair Esther Schor, the John J.F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor and professor of English. “Whatever her topic — the predations of fracking, the resistance of Afghan women, a Black church in Philadelphia or Gazan child amputees — she writes with a reporter’s shrewdness and a poet’s grace.”

Griswold has written and translated several books of nonfiction and poetry, including Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2019; I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, which she translated to English from Pashto; and a recent book of poems, If Men, Then. Her forthcoming book, “Circle of Hope:  A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church,” builds on years of Griswold’s immersive reporting to tell the story of a Philadelphia church and a community in crisis.

She has received prestigious fellowships from Harvard University, Harvard Divinity School, the New America Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Recognized across disciplines, Griswold has been awarded top prizes in various fields, including the Rome Prize in Poetry by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for nonfiction, and a PEN award for translation.

An alumna of Princeton, Griswold earned a bachelor of arts in English from the University in 1995. She previously taught in the Program in Journalism as a Ferris Visiting Professor in 2014-15.

“Returning to Princeton in this wonderful role is nothing less than a life-long dream,” said Griswold. “I am delighted to have the opportunity to support a new generation of talented, altruistic, and adventurous students who are brave enough to consider becoming journalists.”

Read the full article on the Humanities Council website