Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an American multimedia artist and poet, whose work has been published in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her most recent poetry collection is Seeing the Body. Her first novel, Promise, tells the story of two Black sisters growing up in small-town New England at the end of the 1950s, during the Civil Rights Movement. She discusses this book, and the global role of literature, with Colombian writer and political essayist Juan Gabriel Vásquez (The Sound of Things Falling), a former winner of the IMPAC International Dublin Literary Award and Man Booker International Prize finalist.