The 2017 No Depression Writing Fellowship awarded a monetary gift to a music writer for deep-digging stories related to the music that moved us. This fellowship was founded to underscore and energize the value of the highest quality music journalism and other modes of music writing. The 2017 Fellowship of $10,000 was awarded to Sarah Smarsh who wrote 4 installments on Dolly Parton for the 2017 No Depression quarterly journals.
2017 Freshgrass Foundation fellowship winner
Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who writes about socioeconomic class in America. She has reported on public policy for Harper’s, New Yorker.com,
The Guardian, Guernica, and others. Her essays on cultural boundaries have been published by Aeon, McSweeney’s, and more. She formerly
reviewed female country acts for alt-weeklies in the Midwest. Smarsh’s book on the working poor and her upbringing in rural Kansas is forthcoming
from Scribner. She lives in Kansas and Texas. She is currently a Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.