bio
Emma Copley Eisenberg is the nationally bestselling author of two books of fiction—Fat Swim and the novel Housemates, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize — and the nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared widely including in The Yale Review, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Cut, TIME, The New York Times Review of Books, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts, and is a 2026 Pew Foundation fellow. She’s received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Tin House and others, and has taught creative writing at Wesleyan University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, Temple University and independently.
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Emma Copley (pronounced cop-ley) Eisenberg is the author of the novel Housemates, which was an American Books Association and USA Today national bestseller, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction, and named a best book of the year by The Boston Globe, People, NBC, Them.Us, Autostraddle, and Kirkus Reviews as well as one of Electric Literature’s “Top 5 Novels of 2024” and Time Magazine’s “16 Best Books to Read for Pride.” Housemates was also longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and The Chautauqua Prize, and won The Athenaeum of Philadelphia’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Dorothy Allison/Felice Picano Award from the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared widely including in The Yale Review, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Cut, TIME, The New York Times Review of Books, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
She is a 2026 Pew Fellow in the Arts and has received fellowships, grants and residencies from Yaddo, Bread Loaf, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, Monson Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.
Eisenberg is also the author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, a work of hybrid nonfiction that mixes memoir, cultural criticism, and reporting. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice of 2020 and was a finalist for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Bouchercon Award among other honors.
Eisenberg has taught creative writing at Haverford College, 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, and independently. She also holds a Bachelors of Arts from Haverford College. Raised in New York City, she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts. Her next book of fiction, Fat Swim, which includes the Pushcart Prize-winning title story, will be published by Random House on April 28, 2026.
Recent Writing
Some recent writing includes “Lanternfly,” a short story in The Yale Review about a young librarian who takes a summer job “assisting” an aging gay science fiction writer at the Jersey Shore, a reported opinion piece for The New Republic exploring fatphobia in the contemporary American literary fiction landscape, an essay on about the “Unhinged Bisexual Woman” novel for Lux Magazine, a meditation on the digital exploitation of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis, a Boston Globe review of Marcy Dermansky’s novel Hurricane Girl, and a deep dive into why it’s so hard to find the right fat wedding dress. Other writings, including Pushcart-winning and notable Best American short fiction and GLAAD-nominated journalism, can be found in the archive.