Linda Nordquist

Linda Nordquist is a writer, photographer, clinical social worker, and former steelworker whose life and work have been shaped by labor, social justice, and the experiences of working people. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she worked at U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, Pennsylvania, during a period of profound upheaval in the American steel industry. That firsthand experience of mill life, labor struggles, and the devastating decline of steel communities would later become central to her fiction.

Nordquist later pursued a career in social work, graduating from the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work. She also completed training at the New England Institute of Gestalt Therapy and became a certified EMDR therapist. Over more than two decades as a psychotherapist, her work has included trauma, PTSD, grief, domestic violence, sexual assault, and other complex life experiences. She has also conducted trauma work with survivors of natural disasters in the Peruvian Andes.

Her experiences extend well beyond Pennsylvania. Nordquist lived in Peru, where she wrote the memoir The Andes for Beginners, before later living in Rapid City, South Dakota. Her debut novel with Hard Ball Press, Woman Missing: A Mill Town Mystery, draws deeply from her years as a steelworker. The novel follows the disappearance of steelworker and union activist Ginny Johnson and, decades later, her daughter’s search for the truth. Through the mystery, Nordquist explores labor conflict, mill closures, racism, misogyny, and the human consequences of industrial decline.

Her unusual combination of experience as a steelworker, social worker, traveler, photographer, and writer gives her work a perspective rooted both in working-class life and in the complexities of human resilience.