Emily Strasser

Emily Strasser is the author of Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, a deeply researched memoir that traces her journey to reckon with the toxic legacies of secrecy of her grandfather’s work building nuclear weapons in the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She is the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest, the 2024 Reed Prize in Environmental Writing from the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the AWP Intro Award, and she has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Vassar College, and Colgate University.

Emily’s work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere She was also the presenter of the 2020 BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Emily is based in Minneapolis, where she received her MFA from the University of Minnesota.