Emma Copley Eisenberg is a writer of fiction and nonfiction about queeerness, embodiment, gender, central Appalachia, and crime. She is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette Books, 2020) and the forthcoming novel and short story collection Housemates and Fat Swim (Hogarth, 2024, 2025). 

Eisenberg's 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 Bread Loaf, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

Her first book of nonfiction is The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia 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. Invested in diversifying access to reporting skills, she teaches the course Reporting for Creative Writers, and has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Virginia, Temple University, Catapult, and others. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.

Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Her next two books, a novel and a collection of short stories, are forthcoming from Hogarth (Penguin Random House).