Sarah

Smarsh

Award-Winning Writer

Travels from: Rural Kansas

“Smarsh’s ability to interweave stories—including aspects of her life—places her in the tradition of working-class journalism exemplified by Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich and others…The deep empathy that animates Smarsh’s prose combines with a rigorous intellect committed to uncovering and explaining structural causes of our current cultural moment.” — Los Angeles Times

Sarah Smarsh has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, the winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, and a best-books-of-the-year selection by President Barack Obama. Her 2020 book She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Smarsh is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. A former writing professor, Smarsh has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She lives in rural Kansas.

Smarsh’s newest book, Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class, published in 2024 by Scribner. She is currently at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem.

Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class

Sarah Smarsh |

September 10, 2024

Essays

“A must-read for today’s politics” (San Francisco Chronicle), the brilliant and provocative essays that established National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh as one of the most important commentators on America’s class problem are collected in one searing and insightful volume.

In Bone of the Bone, Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times—class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on cultural dissonance that many in her industry neglected until recently. Now, this thought-provoking collection of more than thirty of her highly relevant, previously published essays from the past decade (2013–2024)—ranging from personal narratives to news commentary—demonstrates a life and a career steeped in the issues that affect our collective future.

“A compassionate look at working-class poverty in America” (Time), Bone of the Bone is a singular work covering one of the most tumultuous decades in civic life. Timely, filled with perspective-shifting observations, and a pleasure to read, Sarah Smarsh’s essays—on topics as varied as the socioeconomic significance of dentistry, laws criminalizing poverty, fallacies of the “red vs. blue” political framework, working as a Hooters Girl, and much more—are an important addition to any discussion on contemporary America.

Class & Economic Inequality, Creative Nonfiction, Journalism, Memoir & Personal Journeys

She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

Scribner |

October 13, 2020

Biography

Nominated for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland focuses her laser-sharp insights on a working-class icon and one of the most unifying figures in American culture: Dolly Parton.

Growing up amid Kansas wheat fields and airplane factories, Sarah Smarsh witnessed firsthand the particular vulnerabilities—and strengths—of women in working poverty. Meanwhile, country songs by female artists played in the background, telling powerful stories about life, men, hard times, and surviving. In her family, she writes, “country music was foremost a language among women. It’s how we talked to each other in a place where feelings aren’t discussed.” And no one provided that language better than Dolly Parton.

Smarsh challenged a typically male vision of the rural working class with her first book, Heartland, starring the bold, hard-luck women who raised her. Now, in She Come By It Natural, originally published in a four-part series for The Journal of Roots Music, No Depression, Smarsh explores the overlooked contributions to social progress by such women—including those averse to the term “feminism”—as exemplified by Dolly Parton’s life and art.

Far beyond the recently resurrected “Jolene” or quintessential “9 to 5,” Parton’s songs for decades have validated women who go unheard: the poor woman, the pregnant teenager, the struggling mother disparaged as “trailer trash.” Parton’s broader career—from singing on the front porch of her family’s cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains to achieving stardom in Nashville and Hollywood, from “girl singer” managed by powerful men to leader of a self-made business and philanthropy empire—offers a springboard to examining the intersections of gender, class, and culture.

Infused with Smarsh’s trademark insight, intelligence, and humanity, She Come By It Natural is a sympathetic tribute to the icon Dolly Parton and—call it whatever you like—the organic feminism she embodies.

Creative Nonfiction, Feminism, History & Biography, Nonfiction, Performing Arts

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Scribner |

September 18, 2018

Memoir

*Finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize*
*Instant New York Times Bestseller*
*Named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, The New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly*

An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country.

Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland.

During Sarah’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country.

A beautifully written memoir that combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland examines the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.

“A deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight, Heartland is one of a growing number of important works—including Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville—that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America’s postindustrial decline…Smarsh shows how the false promise of the ‘American dream’ was used to subjugate the poor. It’s a powerful mantra” (The New York Times Book Review).

Class & Economic Inequality, Creative Nonfiction, Family Narratives, Memoir & Personal Journeys

Coming Soon!

Sarah has spoken widely on socioeconomic class, rural issues, the news media and wealth inequality at professional conferences, community events, university lecture series, book festivals and more. She has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Obama Foundation Summit, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Adelaide (Australia) Festival, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Rural Summit, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Clinton School of Public Service and many university lecture series, libraries and book festivals across the United States. She has also served as keynote speaker for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Planned Parenthood, RuralX, Quest Bridge and many other organizations. From small-town civic spaces to big-city bookstores, from rural America to the United States Senate, from the Moth storytelling mainstage to the Sydney Opera House, she has brought her first-hand vantage on economic hardship to diverse audiences around the world. Sarah is also a frequent political commentator in national media.

“A deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight, Heartland is one of a growing number of important works – including Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville – that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America’s postindustrial decline. . . . With deft primers on the Homestead Act, the farming crisis of the ‘80s, and Reaganomics, Smarsh shows how the false promise of the ‘American dream’ was used to subjugate the poor. It’s a powerful mantra.” — New York Times Book Review

“Heartland is [Smarsh’s] map of home, drawn with loving hands and tender words. This is the nation’s class divide brought into sharp relief through personal history … Heartland is a thoughtful, big-hearted tale … Heartland is a welcome interruption in the national silence that hangs over the lives of the poor and a repudiation of the culture of shame that swamps people who deserve better.” — Washington Post

“Something about Sarah Smarsh’s writing makes you light up inside. You feel her joy and grief, fury and hope … That is how I felt reading Smarsh’s book: as if the world could wait until I got to the end.” — The American Conservative

“Smart, nuanced and atmospheric … Heartland deepens our understanding of the crushing ways in which class shapes possibility in this country. It’s an unsentimental tribute to the working-class people Smarsh knows — the farmers, office clerks, trash collectors, waitresses — whose labor is often invisible or disdained.” — NPR Books

“In her sharply-observed, big-hearted memoir, Heartland, Smarsh chronicles the human toll of inequality, her own childhood a case study … what this book offers is a tour through the messy and changed reality of the American dream, and a love letter to the unruly but still beautiful place she called home.” — Boston Globe

“In one searing—and stunning—collection, Bone of the Bone gives the often-ignored people in what some call ‘flyover country’ their due. [The] intersection of personal and political is where Smarsh’s powers of observation and will to incite change thrive. Bone of the Bone is a collection that offers a multitude of gifts on a variety of heavy-hitting levels and is a must-read for today’s politics.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“A compassionate look at working-class poverty in America…an insightful collection of essays.” — Time

“We were dazzled by Sarah Smarsh’s timely essay collection. Anyone with an interest in politics and class conflict will find this an enriching read.” — Women.com

“[Smarsh’s] writing is both muscular—she writes with such conviction—and anchored in place. Reading someone writing about the state of the grasslands—what is directly outside her window—is such a breath of fresh air.” — Kansas City Star

Sarah’s Media Link

Sarah’s Journalism

Honors, Awards & Recognition

New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the National Book Award
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize
Best Book of the Year Selection by President Barack Obama
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award