[1] Her published books of non-fiction include Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies in May 2008, Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate in 2012,[2] and The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic in 2015.

[12] Strand has received residency grants from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as a fellowship in nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and a Tennessee Williams scholarship in fiction from the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

[16] Her 2008 article "The Crying Indian" in Orion, which won a Pushcart Prize, drew links between Native American displacement, government-funded aluminum production, and Keep America Beautiful, which she labels an astroturfing organization.

[8] She lists her obsessions as water, ancient Rome, infrastructure, SuperFund, airplanes, silent film, panopticons, P. T. Barnum, photography, lies, the 1930s, Niagara Falls, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Edward Wormley, consumerism and rhinoceroses, especially one named Clara who lived in the 18th century.

[19] Strand describes Flight as “the echoes and overlaps of four voices.”[20] The story takes places in the days leading up to a wedding in rural Michigan as the Gruens, a Midwestern family, struggle with their individual private dramas.

Strand's second book was nonfiction, Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, Lies, and published by Simon & Schuster in early 2008.

In researching her second book, Strand used handbills, guidebooks, travelogues, treaties, and images in the American Antiquarian Society's collections.

"[28] Her fourth book The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2015.