SARAH SMARSH

IN CONVERSATION WITH CONNIE SCHULTZ

Join the Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation on Friday, May 3, for a conversation between writer and journalist Connie Schultz and Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country in the World.

The book was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Awards and has received other prestigious honors.

With both personal stories from her own life and deeply researched socioeconomic analysis of class in America, Heartland illuminates the unseen, unheard realities of the American working class—which over the course of the author’s turbulent upbringing in rural Kansas in the 1980s and ’90s became the American working poor.

Sarah Smarsh is an author, educator, speaker, and journalist who focuses on socioeconomic class and rural America. Her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth examines historic economic inequality and tells the story of her upbringing among the working poor on a Kansas farm. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia, as well as degrees in journalism and English from the University of Kansas. She is a regular commentator in national media and has spoken on poverty, politics, rural issues, cultural divides and the future of news. She will soon launch a much-anticipated podcast about class and rural America.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize winning, nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate, and Professional in Residence at Kent State University School of Journalism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for Commentary for columns that judges praised for providing “a voice for the underdog and the underprivileged.”  Schultz is the author of two books published by Random House, Life Happens – And Other Unavoidable Truths, a collection of essays, and …and His Lovely Wife, a memoir about her husband Sherrod Brown’s successful 2006 race in Ohio for the U.S. Senate. 

The board of the Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation invites you to join us for the 5th annual Looking Forward event. This unique fundraiser is created to expand horizons, continue to build long-standing camaraderie among the Library’s key supporters and to encourage generous gifting to support the Iowa City Public Library.