[1][2] Griswold was a fellow at the New America Foundation from 2008 to 2010 and won a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

[5] She won the first Robert I. Friedman Prize in Investigative Journalism in 2004, for "In the Hiding Zone", about Pakistan's Waziristan Agency.

She worked with later murdered Pakistani journalist Hayatullah Khan, because, as she said, “he followed the story, no matter the personal cost.”[6] Griswold published Wideawake Field, a book of poetry, on May 17, 2007.

[15] Griswold won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her book Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.

[17] In 2024, Griswold's next book, A Circle of Hope: Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.