Sarah Smarsh
Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, the winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, and a best-books-of-the-year selection by President Barack Obama. Her 2020 book, commissioned by FreshGrass, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Recipient, No Depression Writing Commission
The No Depression Writing Fellowship gives its recipient the unique opportunity of focusing on one story for a full year, giving them room to dig deeper into a subject than any single article might allow.
Sarah wrote 40,000 words for No Depression over the course of 2017, which we was published in installments across the year’s four print journals. Her subject: the ways in which Dolly Parton has given voice to white working-class feminism. It later became a book: SHE COME BY IT NATURAL Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Named a must-read book of 2020 by Time Magazine
Read the New York Times interview
Read the Los Angeles Times review
Read an excerpt at Slate
Growing up amid Kansas wheat fields and airplane factories, Sarah Smarsh witnessed firsthand the particular vulnerabilities—and strengths—of women in working poverty. Meanwhile, country songs by female artists played in the background, telling powerful stories about life, men, hard times, and surviving. In her family, she writes, “country music was foremost a language among women. It’s how we talked to each other in a place where feelings aren’t discussed.” And no one provided that language better than Dolly Parton.
Smarsh challenged a typically male vision of the rural working class with her first book, Heartland, starring the bold, hard-luck women who raised her. In She Come By It Natural, originally published as a four-part series for roots-music magazine No Depression, Smarsh explores the overlooked contributions to social progress by such women—including those averse to the term “feminism”—as exemplified by Dolly Parton’s life and art.
