Thank you to the English teachers of Kansas public schools, who told a child from a family of laborers that she was a writer who deserved to be heard: in elementary school, Val Cheatham; in middle school, Patty Strothman; in high school, Stacey Walters and Lawna Bass Kurya; at a state university, Mary Klayder and Tom Lorenz.
Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (New York: Scribner, 2018), p. 290
