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Emma Copley Eisenberg

“Especially in criminal justice, it feels really important to create ways to hold empathy for all people involved in the criminal justice system, which is a system that doesn’t automatically give empathy to a lot of people. We need to have empathy for these people, because masculinity is a prison, because schizophrenia is a terrible disease, white supremacy is a terrible disease. [We need to] hold space for both sides of the story and not try to make one universally true statement out of it.”

NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020


LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD NOMINEE FOR BISEXUAL NONFICTION


EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST FACT CRIME

 

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In this exceptional, keenly observed meditation on art and love, queer roomies Bernie and Leah set out on a road trip through Pennsylvania, where Bernie, a photographer with a vintage camera, and journalist Leah document their travels in post-COVID, post-Trump America.
People on Housemates
Readers will count themselves lucky to go along for the ride.
Publishers Weekly on Housemates
Emotionally rich and quietly thought-provoking, this is simply a stunning debut.
Kirkus Reviews starred review for Housemates
A haunting and hard-to-characterize book about restless women and the things that await them on the road…Eisenberg dives deep here into the backstories of the victims, investigators and suspects, as well as the cultural “backstory” of Appalachia itself.
— Fresh Air
An evocative and elegantly paced examination of the murders that takes a prism-like view of the crime…Not just a masterly examination of a brutal unsolved crime, which leads us through many surprising twists and turns and a final revelation about who the real killer might be. It’s also an unflinching interrogation of what it means to be female in a society marred by misogyny.
New York Times Book Review
The Third Rainbow Girl is part of a new wave of books upending true-crime tropes and pushing at the boundaries of the genre. If this is a book about a murder, it is also a book about the history of economic exploitation in Appalachia, the systemic biases of the criminal justice system, and the unreliability of memory.
The Nation

Emma Copley Eisenberg is the author of the nationally bestselling debut novel Housemates (Hogarth, 2024), praised as “emotionally rich and quietly thought-provoking” by Kirkus in a starred review. Her first book of narrative nonfiction is The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020) which was named a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice of 2020 as well as nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Bouchercon Award among other honors. 

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Esquire, Guernica, The Washington Post Magazine, and others. She has received fellowships, grants and residencies from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

Eisenberg has taught creative writing at Wesleyan University, Bryn Mawr College, Temple University, and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in fiction and was a Henry Hoyns/Poe Faulkner fellow. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.

 

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