Emily Meg Weinstein was born in New York and raised in Queens and Long Island. After receiving a B.A. with honors in 2001 from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, she lived in Brooklyn until 2010, when she went west to California. She lives on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay, and roams in her second home, the Free Ford Freestar. Her debut memoir, Turn to Stone, is forthcoming from Simon Element (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in 2025.

Emily’s work has appeared in Salon, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Longreads, Climbing, Rock and Ice, Okey-Panky/Electric Literature, The Billfold, The Hairpin, The Huffington Post, The Morning News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Identity Theory, Killing the Buddha, and other publications. She has been anthologized in the California Prose Directory: New Writing From the Golden State and YOU: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person. Her essay, “Mating Habits of the Asterisk,” was mentioned as a Notable Essay of 2014 in The Best American Essays 2015.

In 2010 she was a Researcher-In-Residence in Freetown Christiania, in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2012 she received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in nonfiction to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. From 2011 to 2013 she was an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. She has been awarded residencies at Caldera Arts, This Will Take Time, The Roundhouse Foundation, and PLAYA Summer Lake.