Kristen Iversen’s book,Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, is part memoir and part investigation. She grew up in the 1960s and 70s near the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a housewife. She and her brother and two sisters had dogs and horses and played outdoors in what seemed like an idyllic landscape.
From its opening in 1952, Rocky Flats had a history of environmental abuses and an Energy Department survey later found Rocky Flats to be “the most dangerous site in America.” Weapons production eventually ended after FBI agents raided the plant in 1989.
Kristen Iversen currently heads the PhD program in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. She's one of the featured authors at the Great Plains Writers' Conferenceat South Dakota State University next week. She’s speaking at 7 pm in the McCrory Gardens Visitors Center on Monday, March 23. Iversen joined Dakota Midday and discussed the Rocky Flats plant.