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.