Griswold's Journalism Started With Honor Killing

By Anna Louie Sussman

WeNews correspondent

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Eliza Griswold's "The Tenth Parallel" began as a probe of religious fundamentalism's link to violence. After traveling through Africa and Southeast Asia, she just wanted to tell the stories she found along the way.

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No Stranger to Religion

Griswold, the daughter of Frank Griswold III, the Episcopal bishop of Chicago, is herself no stranger to the bonds of religion.

She grew up grappling with questions of faith, intellect and social justice, which she touches on briefly in the book.

She graduated with an English degree from Princeton in 1995 and wrote her creative thesis in poetry, an alternate form of expression that continues to inform and complement her journalistic work.

After working at The Paris Review and Vanity Fair, she landed her first major journalistic assignment in 2000, when she was inspired by a Human Rights Watch report to investigate "honor" killings, in which a woman is killed, usually by a male relative, to "cleanse" her family's honor following a perceived transgression.

The story found its home at The New Republic and took her to the West Bank and Jordan.

When she returned from the Middle East, she re-sold the story to the Sunday Times of London. Six months later, after the events of September 11, 2001, she called them again. Did they need a stringer? They did. She was off to Pakistan.

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Anna Louie Sussman is a New York-based writer whose work focuses on women's issues, human rights, education and the environment. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune and the Nation, among other publications. She also blogs about ice cream around the world at www.lickmeeverywhere.blogspot.com.

For more information:

Signed Edition of "The Tenth Parallel" from Powell's
http://www.powells.com/partner/34289/biblio/9780374273187?p_isbn

2004 Human Rights Watch report on Honor Killing in Jordan:
http://www.hrw.org/en/node/12141/section/2

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