Kristen Iversen, associate professor of Creative Writing, Featured on NPR and C-SPAN

Dr. Kristen Iversen, associate professor of Creative Writing, is reaching a national audience with her recently released book, Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats. Based on Iversen's experience of growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated “the most contaminated site in America,” the book was chosen by Barnes & Noble for its Great New Writers program. Virginia Commonwealth University selected the book for its Summer Reading program for incoming freshman. Earlier this spring, Iversen published an op-ed in the New York Times, the book has been excerpted in Reader’s Digest and The Nation, and she has work forthcoming in Brevity, Fourth Genre, the AWP Chronicle, and others. She’s been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air and C-SPAN Book TV and has spent her summer giving readings throughout Colorado, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon and California.

Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and—unknown to those who lived there—tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium. It’s also a book about the destructive power of secrets—both family and government. Her father’s hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats (cleaning supplies, her mother guessed)—best not to inquire too deeply into any of it.

But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions. She learned about the infamous 1969 “Mother’s Day Fire,” in which a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously ignited, and—despite the desperate efforts of firefighters—came perilously close to a “criticality,” the deadly blue flash that signals a nuclear chain reaction. Intense heat and radiation almost melted the roof, which nearly resulted in an explosion that would have had devastating consequences for the entire Denver metro area. Yet the only mention of the fire was on page 28 of the Rocky Mountain News, underneath a photo of the Pet of the Week. In her early thirties, Iversen even worked at Rocky Flats for a time, typing up memos in which accidents were always called “incidents.”

And as this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism—a detailed and shocking account of the government’s sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents’ vain attempts to seek justice in court. Here, too, are vivid portraits of former Rocky Flats workers—from the healthy, who regard their work at the plant with pride and patriotism, to the ill or dying, who battle for compensation for cancers they got on the job. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book promises to have a very long half-life.

Iversen is the Coordinator of the Creative Writing concentration in the Department of English and has served as the Editor-in-Chief of The Pinch, an award-winning literary journal housed in the Department. Additional information about Full Body Burden or Iversen’s other books can be found at www.kristeniversen.com.