Emi Nietfeld is an award-winning journalist and the author of Acceptance. Her feature, “The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It?” was Wired’s most-read story of 2025, won a New York Press Club award, and sparked a global debate around surrogacy regulation.

Her buzzy yet profound stories strike a cultural nerve. Her viral New York Times feature about Gen-Z ambition, was featured on NPR and elicited responses in the Wall Street Journal and other international publications. “After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again” was one of the NYT’s most read op-eds of 2021,and sparked a global conversation about career that fueled “the Great Resignation.” Her New York Magazine investigation of an international surrogacy gone wrong reached policy makers on both sides of the aisle.

As a teenager, Emi was homeless and  in foster care, experiences she wrote about in Acceptance (Penguin Press, 2022). The New York Times called it “a remarkable memoir”; NPR, Amazon, and the Junior Library Guild named it a best book of the year. It was translated into three languages and was selected as a first-year read by universities across the country.

Her work has been cited in law reviews, printed in an AP English textbook, featured in Yale Medical School grand rounds, and appeared in bioethics syllabi. My work is taught in classrooms from middle schools to PhD programs, from rural Arkansas to Sydney, Australia. She frequently speaks on campuses, from California community colleges to Columbia Journalism School.

Emi graduated from Harvard College in 2015 with a computer science degree. Before becoming a journalist, she worked as a software engineer at Google and Meta.

Originally from Minneapolis, Emi lives in New York City with her family.