Tag: Sarah Smarsh

The author of “Heartland,” a National Book Award longlisted memoir about growing up poor in rural America, gives her views on politics, identity, and cultural appropriation.

“There’s an idea that laborers end up in their role because it’s all they’re suited for. What put us there, though, was birth, family history — not lack of talent for something else.”

In her first column on craft, Sarah Menkedick speaks with Sarah Smarsh, Lauren Markham, and Jennifer Percy on the art of the interview.

Sarah Smarsh’s brother has sold his plasma for the last decade to make ends meet under mounting credit card debt and student loans.

It wasn’t poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the “war on drugs.” Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black “welfare queen.” These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at […]

Nearly nine out of ten cops are men. Sarah Smarsh discusses the police force’s gender problem and a Wichita woman’s efforts inside the criminal justice system that failed her.

“There often is a ‘tone’ in writing about the poor. There is a presumption that people of a certain class are mired in misery.”