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Emma Copley Eisenberg

Biography

Emma Copley Eisenberg

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The New York Times, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, The New Republic, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire and others. Her first book of nonfiction is THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL. She lives in Philadelphia, where she directs Blue Stoop, a hub for the literary arts. Her next two books, a novel and a collection of short stories, will be published by Hogarth (Penguin Random House) in approximately 2022 and 2024.

Emma Copley Eisenberg

Books by Emma Copley Eisenberg

The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia
by Emma Copley Eisenberg - Nonfiction, True Crime

On June 25, 1980, in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For 13 years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. In THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL, Emma Copley Eisenberg uses the Rainbow Murders case as a starting point for a thought-provoking tale of an Appalachian community bound by the false stories that have been told about it.