WilmU Book Club

May 2019  |  Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and
Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Tuesday, May 21, 2019  |  12:30 PM
Pratt Student Center, New Castle Campus

RSVP to reserve your spot today!

Please join the WilmU Book Club for a discussion on Sarah Smarsh's book, Heartland. This month's guest moderator will be Professor Deb Berke.

Students and Faculty members can borrow a copy of the book from the Delaware Library Catalog. Click on 'Place Hold' to have the book sent to the Wilmington University Library in New Castle.

Can't make it in person? Attend online! https://wilmu.zoom.us/j/848697808

ABOUT THE BOOK

During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Smarsh has written about socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for the Guardian, the New York Times, the Texas Observer, Pacific Standard, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and many other publications. A recent Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a former professor of nonfiction writing, Smarsh is a frequent speaker on economic inequality and media narratives relating this topic. She lives in Kansas. Heartland is her first book.

Upcoming Book Club Events

• July 2019: Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats