Emily Strasser is a Minneapolis-based writer. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and work has appeared in Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, Catapult, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Tricycle. Her essays have been listed as notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017, and she was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest and a 2016 AWP Intro Award. Her work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College, the Jerome Foundation, and the University of Minnesota Human Rights Program. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University.



She is working on a book about the intersection of family and national secrets in the nuclear city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She is interested in the stories we tell about ourselves—personally, publicly, culturally—the stories institutions tell, and the intersections and fissures between them. In Cassis, she plans to research the ITER project, the world's largest experimental fusion reactor, which proposes to build a star on Earth, while meditating on the characteristics, causes, and consequences of brilliance, both literal and figurative.

Photo by Michelle Montjoy