In BONE OF THE BONE, National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times --- class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on cultural dissonance that many in her industry neglected until recently. Now, this thought-provoking collection of more than 30 of her highly relevant, previously published essays from the past decade (2013–2024) --- ranging from personal narratives to news commentary --- demonstrates a life and a career steeped in the issues that affect our collective future.

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 that “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. In SHE COME BY IT NATURAL, Smarsh explores the overlooked contributions to social progress by such women as exemplified by Dolly Parton’s life and art.

During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her --- untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgment, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country.

During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and ’90s, 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.