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Sarah Smarsh

Biography

Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics and public policy for The Guardian, VQR, NewYorker.com, Harpers.org, The Texas Observer and many others. She is currently a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. A former professor of nonfiction writing, Smarsh is a frequent speaker on economic inequality and related media narratives. She lives in Kansas. HEARTLAND is her first book.

Sarah Smarsh

Books by Sarah Smarsh

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (Audiobook)
written and read by Sarah Smarsh - Memoir, Nonfiction

During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and ’90s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor and level of consciousness.

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
by Sarah Smarsh - Memoir, Nonfiction, Sociology

During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and ’90s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor and level of consciousness.