Kristen Iversen, director of the master of fine arts program in creative writing at the University of Memphis, has won numerous awards for her book Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (Crown Publishers, 2012). The book is a memoir of her growing up near the nuclear weapons site in Colorado.
The book was named one of the best books of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews and the American Library Association. It was won the 2012 Best Book About Justice award from The Atlantic magazine. The book is a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and a finalist for the American Carnegie Medal for Excellence.
Professor Iversen is a graduate of the University of Colorado and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. She is editor-in-chief of The Pinch, a literacy journal that is published at the University of Memphis. She is also the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth (Johnson Books, 1999), a biography of the “Unsinkable Molly Brown” and Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction (Longman, 2003).