New Faculty Joining the English Department in 2024

I write with great pleasure to share the news that Emily Strasser (MFA in Creative Nonfiction, U of Minnesota) will be joining the English Department faculty as our new Professor of the Practice of Creative Nonfiction and Journalism starting in Fall 2024. This position is one among a cluster on “Climate” supported by the Provost’s Office.

Emily’s first book, Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History (University Press of Kentucky, 2023), is a deeply researched memoir which confronts the legacy of her grandfather’s work building nuclear weapons, from the intimate to the environmental to the global. It weaves together the personal and the political, the reported and the lyric, to ask questions about guilt, responsibility, mental illness, complicity, and love. The narrative moves through resonances between the culture of secrecy within her family, within the nuclear weapons industry, and the harms caused by these silences, including the devastation of Hiroshima, mental illness in the family, and the environmental contamination and public health impacts from weapons production. The book won the 2024 Reed Environmental Writing Award.

Emily has published in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Catapult, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Bitter Southerner, and The New York Times, among other venues, and she was the presenter of the 2020 BBC podcast “The Bomb,” produced for the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.  Her work has been recognized by a Ploughshares Emerging Writers award, an AWP Intro Award, and two notable mentions in Best American Essays. Her writing and research have been supported by the McKnight Foundation, the Colgate University Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the W.K. Rose Fellowship, among others.

We are so pleased to welcome Emily to Tufts in Fall 2024!