Emma Copley Eisenberg in Conversation With Vanessa Veselka

In the early evening of June 25, 1980, in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived; they traveled with a third woman, however, who lived. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and reinvestigating these brutal acts. In The Third Rainbow Girl (Hachette), Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America – its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence. Eisenberg will be joined in conversation by Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen.