Kristen Iversen

Summary

Kristen Iversen is an American author, journalist, and scholar whose work interweaves memoir, history, and investigative nonfiction. A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Biography, she is also a Fulbright Scholar, an NEH Public Scholar, the 2025–2026 Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan Fellow at CUNY, and a two-time winner of the Colorado Book Award. Her memoir Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats won the Colorado Book Award and the Reading the West Book Award, was named a Best Book of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews and the American Library Association, and is the basis of a forthcoming documentary. Her books include Full Body Burden, Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, and Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction; she also edited Doom with a View and co-edited Don’t Look Now and When I Knew. Her forthcoming biography, The Poet of Science: Nikola Tesla in the Gilded Age, will be published by Crown. Iversen has taught at universities across the United States and abroad and is currently Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where she also serves as Literary Nonfiction Editor of The Cincinnati Review. Originally from Colorado, she is married and has two sons.