Sarah Smarsh | The Common

Podcast: Sarah Smarsh on “Bone of the Bone”

October 24, 2025 Audio, Podcast, Podcasts & Audio

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National Book Award finalist SARAH SMARSH speaks to managing editor EMILY EVERETT about her career writing memoir, essays, and journalism centered on the experience of the rural working class in the US. Her essay in The Common’s fall 2014 issue, “Death of the Farm Family,” became part of her 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which became an instant New York Times bestseller, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and named on President Barack Obama’s best books of the year list.

Smarsh discusses her most recent book, a collection of essays from 2012 to 2024 titled Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class, out this fall in paperback. The conversation ranges from what the media gets wrong about working class Americans to how our understanding of and interest in talking about class and access has changed since the early 2000s. Stick around to hear how Smarsh manages the dual identities of rural Kansas farm kid and nationally recognized writer-commentator on class and culture, and hear what she’s working on next.

Friday Reads: February 2016

February 5, 2016 Reviews

By MARIAN CROTTY, NICK FULLER GOOGINS, GRANT KITTRELL, SARAH SMARSH

How much more palatable is any dish when “imbued with the stories of home”? We’re exploring that this month in our recommendations, which variously braid entertainment and education in their reading experiences. Grow as a writer, a poet, a consumer, a human being—and do it while laughing, remembering home, or teetering on the edge of your seat.

Recommended:

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury, The Door by Magda Szabó,Ennui Prophet by Christopher Kennedy, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi

Friday Reads: December 2014

December 19, 2014 Reviews

By SARAH SMARSH, IAN BASSINGTHWAIGHTE, STEVEN TAGLE, MACEO J. WHITAKER, JENNIFER ACKER, OLIVIA WOLFGANG-SMITH

This month’s recommendations from The Common’s contributors and staff deal with the intersection of old and new, ancient and modern, on every level—personal, religious, political, even supernatural. Perhaps in the spirit of the season, we seem preoccupied by stories of intergenerational strife, love, and ambition. In their urgent focus on belief and truth-seeking, these books represent a literature of searching, a catalogue of quests across time and around the world.

Recommended:

To the End of June by Cris Beam, The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz, We Others by Steven Millhauser, Hum by Jamaal May, High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire.

Often from Kansas: A Conversation with Sarah Smarsh on the Privilege of Rootedness in Midwestern America

December 9, 2014 Interviews

MARNI BERGER interviews SARAH SMARSH

Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh has reported on social justice, the environment, culture, and class for Harper’s, The Huffington Post, Guernica, The Pitch, Aeon, and others. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, as well as degrees in journalism and English from the University of Kansas, and has taught at Washburn University, Columbia, and elsewhere. A fellow of the Center for Kansas Studies, earlier in her career she wrote about her home state for everything from airline magazines to pop-history paperback series. Her essay “Death of the Farm Family” appears in Issue 08 of The Common. Marni Berger and Smarsh discussed the privilege of rootedness in America and what it means to be “often from” a place.

Death of the Farm Family

November 1, 2014 Essays, Issue 08, Issue 08 Essays

By SARAH SMARSH

It was unlikely that Betty and Jeannie would end up in the country. They’d always moved within cities—Wichita, Chicago, Denver, Dallas—and neighboring small towns. And it was unlikely they’d stay for long. They first hit the road when Betty was a teenager and Jeannie a baby, and by the time Jeannie was in high school they’d changed addresses forty-eight times. In the late 1970s, though, they landed for a good while on a Kansas farm.