2024 is the ten year anniversary of the publication of my memoir, Mountain to Mountain. Mountain to Mountain is a first-person journey through the roles that my activism, adventure, motherhood, and sexual assault played in shaping who I am as a woman in my thirties. Through cycling through the remote mountains of the Panjshir Valley, learning to ride a motorcycle on the back roads of Kabul, meeting with women in the Mazar-i-Sharif, Fayrab, and Kandahar prisons, and working to create projects that empower women in a country ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for a woman, I learn the value and cost of having a voice in the world.
“Shannon Galpin's lovely cycling saga is an inspiring and illuminating window into the lives of modern day Afghan women and their continuing struggle to ride their own path to freedom, recognition, and equality.” ―Khaled Hosseini, New York Times bestselling author of The Kite Runner and And The Mountains Echoed
“Mountain to Mountain reads like one of Shannon Galpin's bike rides, fast-paced and unpredictable. It traces her intimate journey as a survivor and her travels across a rugged terrain, in the process bringing alive a vital and poignant message:Equality for Afghan women means more than just voting rights or access to parliament--it means having the same basic freedoms as men.” ―Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among the Living
Streets of Afghanistan was published by Hatherleigh Press in 2013 and documents the 2012 art installation I created in collaboration with Afghan and international photographers. The installation toured Afghanistan as a life-sized, pop-up street art installation.
I documented the installation tour with my long-time friend and collaborator, Tony Di Zinno, who also had images in the exhibition from our first trip together in 2008. The book documents six of the public installations and the process of bringing the exhibition to Afghanistan. The beauty was the public's interactions with the shows, especially young kids. Streets of Afghanistan illustrates the power of representation through art in a country where photography is a daily occurrence for Afghans, but rarely do they get a chance to interact with the images taken. The exhibition and the book normalize the importance of public art in conflict zones.
Art belongs everywhere.
The Rosette is a graphic novel dreamed up by 12-year-old Devon during a field research trip to Namibia and evolved throughout her year-long sabbatical of rewilding and wildlife conservation learning. The Rosette tells the story of a teenage girl born with the power to shapeshift into animals and a mysterious rosette birthmark on the back of her neck. On her 4th birthday, she received a stuffed snow leopard, which she named Himalaya, Himmy for short. Himmy turns out to be alive and becomes her mentor and sidekick, helping her control her powers. Eventually, she understands the meaning behind her rosette birthmark. She learns of a parallel animal world working to fight the sixth extinction and that they have been waiting for The Rosette’s arrival. Integrating the lessons learned from field research with her project, Endangered Activism, and a lifelong passion for endangered species and wildlife conservation, Devon created a superhero story with heart and purpose.
Bridging the literary world into the physical one, Himmy is invisible to everyone but The Rosette and other animals, but she leaves silver footprints behind. This sparked Devon’s first street art project in Paris in the fall of 2017—silver snow leopard footprints walking through the streets of Paris with Himmy’s distinctive heart-shaped pinky toe. The footprints remained for two years; we sought them out on each return visit. Someday, Himmy will return.
Co-written by Shannon Galpin and Devon Galpin Clarke and illustrated by Mariana Prieto.
