Emily Strasser’s first book, Half-Life of a Secret, is 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. It won the 2024 Reed Environmental Writing Award, 2024 Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize.

Emily’s work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Gulf Coast, among others. She was also the presenter of the 2020 BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her writing has been honored by awards and fellowships including the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, an AWP Intro Award, the W.K. Rose Fellowship, the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Creative Writing, and grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. She was a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow. Emily teaches at Tufts University.