Speaker Series: Sarah Smarsh – Reporting on Rural America and Class

Sarah Smarsh has reported on socioeconomic class, politics and public policy for The New Yorker and Harper’s online, The Guardian, Guernica, Longreads and many others.

Her book In the Red, on the American working poor and her own upbringing in rural Kansas, is forthcoming from Scribner. New essays will appear in Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living (Simon & Schuster, January 2017) and Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (OR Books, February 2017). In 2017, she will write at length about intersections among socioeconomic class, feminism and the music and career of Dolly Parton for No Depression, the eminent publication on American country music.

Sarah has filed more than a thousand news stories, and her essays and criticism on cultural boundaries have been published by The Texas Observer, Creative Nonfiction, McSweeney’s, The Morning News and more; her essays “Poor Teeth” (Aeon) and “The First Person on Mars” (Vela) were both listed as notables in Best American Essays. She was a columnist for On Being, a public-media enterprise examining meaning in the 21st century, in 2016.