An Evening with Sarah Smarsh

Join UW Oshkosh’s Director of the Center for Customized Research and Services Jeff Sachse for a conversation with journalist Sarah Smarsh about the importance of rural entrepreneurship in Wisconsin. She will share her experiences and observations with a diverse audience of business owners, elected officials, and economic development professionals.

Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics and public policy for The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Harper’s and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (Scribner, 2018), was an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Award. Smarsh’s second book, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (Scribner, 2020), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

A former writing professor, Smarsh has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She is a frequent speaker and commentator on economic inequality. She lives in Kansas.

This virtual event is sponsored by the Tommy Thompson Center on Public Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Center’s primary goal is to determine how we can produce and facilitate effective public leadership.