Not too long ago, Anne Marie had the opportunity to talk to Emily Strasser. Emily has written a book about a little-known community built in secret by the United States government in rural western Knoxville, Tennessee. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project. 

Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist’s Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow. Her first book, Half-Life of a Secret, a memoir on the intersection of family and national secrets in the nuclear city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is forthcoming in April 2023. Pre-order here.

In this episode, Emily talks about her book, Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, part history, part memoir, and part biography.

Resources:

Emily Strasser: https://emilystrasser.com
Half-Life of a Secret: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813197197/half-life-of-a-secret/
Oak-Ridge, Tennessee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee
Anna Rosenberg Episode: https://armchairhistorians.buzzsprout.com/1020073/12009142

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