Eliza Griswold (Journalism) has been named a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction for “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church.” She is among 25 finalists across five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature.
The book, published in August 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, explores the American evangelical landscape through the lens of a Philadelphia church in crisis.
“I wrote this book because I wanted to make sure that, in the American religious landscape, we understood that evangelicalism isn’t a monolith,” said Griswold, in an author Q&A on the Humanities Council’s Faculty Bookshelf.
“There are so many stories in the mainstream press now about white Christian nationalism and the Christian right,” she said. “[These stories] are important to trace the evolution of evangelical influence in politics and American culture, but it isn’t the whole story. I wanted to make sure that we were looking at the larger landscape.”
Griswold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, translator, and poet, joined Princeton in August 2023 as the director of the Humanities Council’s Program in Journalism.
She has been a contributing writer for The New Yorker for more than two decades, where she has extensively covered religion, politics, and the environment.
The winners of the National Book Award will be announced live on Nov. 20 at an award ceremony in New York City.
