title of the book is the browns of california. some of these authors have or will be on book tv. you can watch them on our website, booktv.org. >> okay. welcome. here tonight to introduce sara smarsh is a very special person from her time as a ku student. dr. mary claiter is the associate director of undergraduate studies and university honors lecturer in english. dr. claiter taught sara on her seminar on creative writing, and i'll add takes full credit for

her success. [laughter] so help me welcome dr. mary clater. >> welcome. it is really a thrill. i can't tell you what a thrill it is to introduce sara smarsh tonight. i first met sara before she started at ku and was fortunate to have her in my freshman writing seminar called so you want to be a writer, hu? and it's going on 24 years. we have a lot of writers, and to have the benefit of her abilities when she was a sedge nar assistant for the same class her senior year. i watched sara become a tenacious thinker and writer, one hungry to explore her own world and tell its truths. she has been doing that ever since. she holds a msa from columbia, as well as degrees in journalism and english from u of kansas. her

previous education involved other schools in kansas. she has taught creative writing at columbia university, washington university, the writing barn in austin texas, and the lawrence art center. shoo has reported on socioeconomic class, and public policy for the guardian, the "new york times," the new yorker, and harper's. sara has filed more than a thousand news stories and her essays and criticism on clump boundaries have been published by the text boxerer, mcsweepies, and more. her the first person on mars were listed as notable and best american esasis, and i'm looking for them in english classes soon. she was a recent fellow at the harvard kennedy school of government. her debut book, "heartland," a memoir is a

meditation on a realities of intergenerational poverty and was recently long-list for the national book award in the non-fiction category. i am horned am honored to introduce sara smarsh smarsh. [applause] >> sara: thank you. mary clater i'm sure she's a hero to many in this room, and thank you to all of you for being here. this is the sith city i've been in seven days. [laughter] oh, yeah. and i'm still standing and so i said that because i wanted you to know lawrence has a special place in my heart for many reasons and i've been so looking forward to this event. i know i have a lot

of old friends in the audience and old mentors, and current friends for that matter, and i'm just so honored by the turnout. thank you to lawrence public library, which is an incredible institution as you all know to raven bookstore, which has long been the indie of my heart. i lived in lawrence if you include my time as undergraduate for 15 years. even though i'm from south central kansas this was my home for almost half my life, and the raven is so dear to me, thank you to liberty hall for hosting. what a delight we needed so much space. so, lawrence fricking kansas, here we are. c-span is here so -- so

i wanted to talk to you a little bit about i read about socioeconomic class that's what i do as a journalist that intersects with aspects of identity, race, gender, also an aspect of human experience i think is underdiscussed in our 21st century digital seemingly post-place moment and that is raw geography. so i'm going to talk about place and tonight, and for that reason i thought i would tell you why lawrence is such a special place to me. along the way you'll glean some of the themes of my book. i grew up on a wheat and cattle farm 30 miles west of wichita, and i was raised largely by my grandparents who left school in sixth and #th grade to work. i'm a first generation college

student in the first of my family to have the privilege of being paid for my passions rather than breaking my body in labor. i have worked those sorts of jobs and have immense and internal gratitude that somebody pays me to do what i have a sense i was sent here to do. so, that aspect of my upbringing is relevant to my first brush with lawrence because as a kid in a rural public high school. kingman high school, which is kingman county, county seat west of wuch taw. >> go eagles. [laughter] >> sara: in that school i was a bookish kid by nature, and public school was the only place that a kid like me who was from

a family where education hadn't really been harnessed but because there wasn't even the time of resources for harnessing it, public school for me was the only place that i was going to access the sort of opportunities that i creatived and needed. and in that school i heard something through the counselor about the thing called the kansas regions honors academy, and you know at that age as a teenager, this is in a pre-internet moment. or rather i should say 1995 or 1996 so it was pre-internet for my people. i didn't have a computer in the i was was a sophomore in collego some of the technological touchstones of people's childhoods from my 1980s childhood was more like the 1950s than the 2000s and that has to do with economic disadvantage. but i heard about the honors academy and i'd never been to a summer camp, this is

not something that happens where i'm from. in summer you work the wheat harvest. i applied for the honors academy and got accepted and i was one of a hundred kids in the state. that year it happened to be at ku. and you know i think that it was the first time i was in lawrence. maybe once or twice in my life i had been in kansas city. we were so grounded by our farm, and also stunted in our travels by our economic station, that even this piece of the country so close theoretically, and e in proximity was felt for me very exotic and far away. and i remember thinking oh, my gosh all these beautiful trees, and hills, and i got to sit in college classrooms on the university of kansas campus and have my intelligence and worth

validated by super fancy professors who did fancy things, and it was a twrans formative moment for me. i ended up perhaps in part because of that experience coming here for my undergrad, and whatever you see me doing as a journalist much of that is owed to the university of kansas j-school, where i graduated. [applause] -- yeah, where i graduated in 2002. i was the last member i was a member of the last class in that j-school to receive an old-fashioned hard-as newspaper training. it was at the moment in what in curricula media convergence, the training was different, it was to equip students for the internet era in various media. what a fine school. and has a lot to do with where i am today.

i doublemerged in english, and that's where i quat the know the delightful mary clater. i went to new york for a few years as people in my industry are encouraged to do. when i got there, there was a palpable sense i began to develop as a student at ku but that really came to a point in the more rarefied spaces that i encountered in new york city including columbia university where i went to graduate school a palpable sense of the otherness of where i came from somehow in those places and maybe even in the american story that we tell ourselves. i was thinking i'm looking around and there's nobody from where i'm from. there's nobody who was involved in agriculture, let alone rural life. and so that was a formative experience in that i think in that moment i

can't unfortunately maybe somebody can help me, i can't remember whose quote this is, but it was like i didn't become a kansas until i went to new york. i was like the kid in school as i said with i was ambitious, bookish, i had goals and on a war path of implement that if you read my book you'll find a little bit about and how that relates to the class issues that i explore. i was the kid that teachers thought she's going to leave kingman, and people might have predicted i was the kid that someone was going to say she got out. a phrase i take issue with, and i'll talk about that in a little bit. when i was in new york, it was like i'm surrounded by kids from the ohio version of me, and west virginia of me, and when they got to new york some of them were like -- they became

new yorkers and they breed the sigh of relief. like this is where i was meant to be my whole life. it was the opposite for me. it fortified the sense of belonging to my home, which was never a place i thought to escape or leave. but the economic realities of the country and in particular my industry required that i leave in some ways to accomplish the things i wanted to do. but i finished grad school and the second i did that i moved back to lawrence, kansas. and i lived here happily as a freelance journalists, a professor for some years, a grant writer for some area social service agencies that have everything to do with the issues i talk about in my book. one of which is van go, and i bet there is some vangogh people here. i was able to write poams

also canlz legal services in topeka, where i learned in helping apply for federal grants for low-income kansans to have fair representation in our judicial systems. i learned a lot of lessons that made their way into this book. like say the violence against women act. this is a book about women. you'll find my dad and grandpa, construction workers in it, and that's the vision of the working class. specifically the white working class maybe but women are the stars of the show, but these policies that so keenly affect women. my education when i was in a non-profit sector was huge. so -- i'm going to read a little bit from this book. i always feel like when writers hold force for too long or like

to hear themselves read their own sentences it's off-putting even for me as a fellow writer, but i have a few more points i'm going to rete from the book and i'm looking forward to your questions too. i talked a little bit about my relationship to this place of kansas. .

to the past and that is the theme in this book. they are going in a memoir but it's a story about my family i worked on for 15 years there was a lot of research piecing together the story of my family from the chaos poverty tends to forget. i was decayed that was aware of the legacies to which i was born, many of them are negative and gain dress. it's a place that embraces and is always aware of its history which is not just crucial to kansas with the rest of the country.

it is a place where like me i think defies the political and cultural expectations of the so-called red state. it is not an argument of any sort. it is a challenge to those who might stereotype the cultural and political monolith to consider the complexity and nuance of people on the ground and i don't have to convince you of that because you already know it. as i recall you like beer a lot. [laughter] so heartland is about class but

also about place and where i'm from. right now there is a buzzword in the national discourse. raise your hand if you have heard the phrase their role urban divide. most people raised their hands. i mentioned before nothing as a kid that grew up on a farm in kansas when i did things like attend an ivy league school, even honestly in the context of the wonderful university of kansas i found itself an outlier in many ways. so where i'm from what seemed to be a rare and peculiar place in the modern postindustrial highly urbanized american story.

i had a new vantage for several years i've been receiving messages from people all over hundreds in the world so few people and from the ownership from the place i come from. i don't think it is necessarily about me or my work. i do work hard and hope something good about it but there is a group of people who have an experience similar to mine in the particulars of.

it has been incredible and so humbling and mind-boggling and gratifying and validatin validas what i always suspect did that this idea of a divide is an innately different people occupy in different regions of the country and it is a dangerous one at that for all walks of life and different skin colors and backgrounds come through the lines and say our stories are different and yet they are the same. that might have to do with the subtitle of the book which is a memoir i want you to clap if you feel me on this a memoir of working hard and being broken on the richest country on earth. [applause]

and so that yo units in of souns knowing that we have a little bit of a problem in the stories that we tell ourselves or have been telling for centuries about this place but there is an american dream that involves hard work and you get what you work for and ultimately this is a meritocracy with what we've got going on. it turns out maybe not so much. and i think that is what is speaking to people and folks are yearning to have validated as a special niche within that but i wanted to point that out. so this is the way that we perceive ourselves an to be categorizing that we do and something essential in

discussing and parsing out the ways that our identities differ. it's for the sake of progress and unity. i'm not seeking empathi am not r compassion for somebody who wishes harm upon you or your group or demographic. i happen to believe and i've been a reporter for long enough that i think i have some authority to form this theory. those folks are fewer in the populatiokeyword in thepopulatik from watching cable news. if you just leave your living room and turn off whatever it is

msnbc, fox and it turns out it isn't just a bunch of hateful bad guys out there. they are out there, but i happen to be a member of the industry that is guilty of this fixation will conflict that drives up ratings and it is essential to address it and you're in a crisis situation. but i think we are sort of perverting our understanding of ourselves if along the way we are not talking about how we are mostly all in this together and decent people who might disagree on how to get to the same outcome. i'm going to read about people i come fro from, this is from 198.

i was 6-years-old living in a house that my construction worker father and the farmer father built with his own hand west of wichita and i hung out with my maternal grandmother alive who was scandalously young, she was 34 when she became a grandmother to me and for that reason she's like a second mother and a grandmother and my mother was more like a sister than a mother. so here i'm hanging out with grandma betty. i cannot remember if this comes up in the passage but if i shift into the second person and say you, this has everything to do with betty becoming a grandmother at 34. i'm a fifth-generation farm kid on my dads side. on my moms side of the family,

they were just like more poverty single female children with the midwestern highway is working in diners having a very transient experience and my grandfather met a farmer and that is how my mom met my dad and kind of like these two different groups convened but on that side of the family, i am the inheritor of a legacy of teen pregnancy so in the book as far back as i could find in any records that were kept so we are talking back in the first woman, female ascendant in my direct maternal winmaternalwinds who didn't havy before age 20.

so when you say i'm speaking to the would-be child i might have had as a teenager which i had a very keen awareness of every young age younger than any young woman or child that should be mindful or fearful of suggesting such a family pattern and so this book is actually while of course you might see this as a metaphor for a myriad of things it is described as an entity or an imagined trial that i am intending to avoid having her conceiving. by the early 1987, grandma betty tired of the long drive between the courthouse in wichita and the farms in the middle of

nowhere. after a young wife working on factory floors and as a diner waitress and the few opportunities that were available to women in the workforce as a female in poverty in the 1960s of course my grandmother's era, by the time i came along she had benefited from a federal grant by way of title ix legislation that allowed her to attend what they called business school and so she learned how to tie a man file things and she ended up landing a gauge as a secretary in that county courthouse in downtown wichita and worked her way up as a probation officer so the fact that she put on high need high heels from kmart was very glamorous and our family.

so she had tired of this long commute she had with her job in wichita and she married a farmer and grandpa said she could quit her job that she didn't want to quit. when had she not work? she was proud of what she did at the courthouse. i got used to the big money. she had a meager salary accepted without negotiation but looking at the farm she paid no rent or mortgage. a lot of what she earned went into savings for the first time in her life were to bail out a friend the way that she had needed it so long ago. she was tired of the commute from the farm but it made more sense she thought to kee talkedb and find a house in wichita

which could be a long-term property investment anyhow. berger then he years on the farm, wichita is still her home. i went along as she visited open houses. i liked the brown brick house with the coffee table. they want to $60,000 for it. that's too high. back home i told mom we went to a house that costs $60,000. that's not much she said. some costly than $100,000. i spent the next week reporting this to anyone who would listen. [laughter] she found a tiny house on second street near downtown wichita mayor her childhood home in the neighborhood where her neighborhood friend had grown up.

her new place was a five-minute drive from her job at the courthouse. she would stay there during the week and spend weekends at the farm with grandpa. he agreed to drive to wichita on weeknights after his chore chors unless the farm kept him up late into the evening. grandma bought the house for $25,000 through a mortgage with balloon payments. a good trick in which they make the monthly payments the first couple of years until the buyer's payment kick in and increase over time. it's like being carried by jesus on a sandy beach and paying him interest for every footprint. [laughter] the yellow orange brick house was built around the time that he was born in 1945 and hit a concrete porch a small victory in the living room with wood floors and didn't eat in kitchen with a small bathroom connected.

we jumped on a mattress covered in plaster on the cement floor until dad started the circle saw and the noise drove us outside. second street was busy with cars and i kept a safe distance as we wandered a few blocks towards the general store with a sign that read george's. it was one of the last family-run grocer is in town and grandma walked there is a kid herself. george was a thousand years away and gave candy out of hr above us. after supper at the new house, bass went back to the country with our parents and grandpa went back to his farm so he would be there for the early

morning chores. i stayed in wichita to help her clean her new house. this is a place where you clean your own house. we scrubbed the kitchen floor, counters, stove and refrigerator. grandma couldn't believe how filthy somebody left the place. we peeled off the wallpaper and she couldn't believe how many layers they left. i pried out of staples and tax and nails and then did a trial in a plastic cup of plaster to smear across the banks and holes. we had a tiny black-and-white television going and when the 10:00 news was going, grandma was ready to hang it up. we were hungry but the new house was empty. for supper we had eaten bologna sandwiches and potato shoestrings from a can. grandma drove us to mcdonald's and told me to get whatever i

wanted. she also told me to get whatever i wanted when we went to fast food restaurants and i understood her generosity is because of the hard life but she lived. i ordered a hot fudge sundae. back at the new house we grabbed a mattress and sheets and she moved the television next to us had settled with a antenna until i saw johnny carson. it felt like an adventure to eat ice cream on a mattress on the floor of an empty house while watching the tonight show. she switched off the tv and the lights. you did work today. i'd forgotten the darkness and quiet o were not the same in wichita as they were in the country. the cars seemed bright and loud

driving past the front door that opened up into the room where we lay. i thought and thought what i did every night until i wished my mind had a switch i could flip. would i like a glass of water. she turned on the kitchen light and screamed. sarah, get up. hundreds of cockroaches ran across the linoleum. hit by something like some of them ran to the bathroom and others scurried around at the bottom of the refrigerator. some towards the dark dining room. i stood up on the mattress and took a step back. a line of roaches started up alongside the mattress. grandma was searching for her

mattress. get your stuff. we are blowing this joint. [laughter] it was after midnight and we were rolling down the familiar strip of highway 54. stars, capital, we each field, prairie grass. grandma was cursing the cockroaches wishing for spiders or june bugs by god anything but a cockroach. [laughter] less than an hour later we were back in the country climbing out of grandma's car to the sound of locusts and the smell of eggs that way in the darkness. grandma quieted the german shepherd as we walked through the front door when he ran up

the creaky wood steps covered in the blue carpet. if i lived to be in the old woman in the trends of my early life continue, by the time i die, half of the population would live in only five of 105 counties. people consolidated. there is a strength in that environmentalists might suggest in the moment of the city but perhaps a greater weakness. president dwight eisenhower a native of kansas said whatever america hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of america. the countryside is no more our nation's heart and our cities and rural people are not born of the board to fight for their work in the field.

but to devalue our social investment and language, the people who tend to the crops and livestock's work to refer to the place as flyover country to forget not just countries foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycle the life scarcely witnessed in the concrete landscapes. for this vision of a sustainable world, and i talk about him previously in the chapter, a kentucky farmer or his vision of the sustainable world one in balance is both economically and environmentally the american heart needs a strong well supported and will respect its chamber outside of the metropolis. the life force that ultimately flows back into those places that we here are dwindling and where the farms are going over

the light source that goes back into those places will likely be from other places. the meat packing towns for instance have become the ethnically diverse places in the country as immigrants stream in from mexico, the middle east and central america to take factory jobs in the agricultural boom. statewide according to the 2010 census many counties declined in eight out of ten but the hispanic population had grow hay 60% in the last ten years. that is a demographic shift not without tension but one that had been embraced and give their home had changed to survive.

one is the closeness in the deep intimacy forced not to buy the proximity in the throes of apartments that having only one neighbor within 3 miles to help when you are sick when the snow starts drifting you check on the one with the mean dog regardless of whether you like her. when i was a teenager in 96, i went to new york city for the first time to compete in a communications contest i qualified for for my high scho school. we visited the statue of liberty which i was excited to climb inside. as i neared the town of sending with hundreds of people front of me and behind me i suddenly had trouble breathing. i wasn't afraid of heights but

terror rose up in front of me and i realized i couldn't get out if i wanted to. i didn't know it but i was having a panic attack resulting from claustrophobia i've never been anywhere crowded enough to know that i had. while the small space echoed with many voices i closed my eyes and took a deep breath. i took to the stranger behind me and looked him in the eye he was from boston as i recalled and i asked if he wanted to take a psychological quiz. [laughter] panic was coursing through me. my voice sounded steady.

i told him a long story about him on a journey to the meadows. i paused to ask him questions. what animal is on the other side. what do you see in the water when you kneel down the concept was something that i heard a person leaving someone else through a mental maze but mostly i made it up. the crowd around us have gotten quiet to listen. he answered and i told him. [laughter] like that kid was so much braver than i am. he and others nodded along with amazement or amusement. as for me, i have something to

focus my mind on one step at a time towards the crown of the statue of liberty. it had been cultivated under the state flag through the difficulties when we got to the top i wasn't scared anymore. someone took my picture, a relieved smile of the harbor behind me through the little windows that glowed through the crown. it's about the country and the city.

but most was the unobstructed freedom. when i was well into adulthood, the united states developed the notion that the dividing line of class and geography separated the essentially different kinds of people. i knew i wasn't right because both sides existed where i was from and what i hoped to do in life the places that i needed to go for the things i meant to do. it is a difference of experien experience. you would have been born on one side of the divide but that wouldn't have been your politics and most definitely not your

character. it would have predicted the things you saw and did to some extent and one defining psychological tension guaranteed by the country's economy. every day you would decide whether to stay, go or try to go into the matter where you went if you wind up like every immigrant you would still feel the invisible dirt of the motherland on the soles of your feet. [applause] thank you so much. i want to talk to all of you know.

i understand someone is going to have a microphone set up. a few days ago in my mailbox came a photo on the front. that was quite an honor. my question is in that article that mentions you said you don't want to bring a child into poverty. the other purpose of your family and elsewhere. i assumed they were part of the

writing process. did they know what you were writing and are they going to get residuals? >> they might also like to know the answer that question. my family has a different school of thought on writing a war or stories about one's family. one school of thought is right whatever you think and someone else sees a different they can write their own book but that isn't how i work as a journali journalist. i think to handle someone's life and view this transforming of the human experience to the ultimately finite character that's quite a gift to receive someone's blessing to do that

and it's something that in my approach different artists would have different opinions but i was checking in with them every step of the way and many of the packages in the book are written to about their presence and that is constructed from many hours of interviews with close membe members. i'm like the only book person in my family that of hollywood and read it like it's boring. [laughter] you think i'm joking but i am serious. i may have to share it with you. my grandmother is kind of the star of the show i was talking

about. kind of a very vivacious and blogs from the left and just has the most genuine spirit. anyone have to right to feel shorted ultimately one perhaps never can in thimr. cannon in te thing that we call reality. she'd read it and texted me. i laughed and cried and the first thing she said had nothing to do with how she was representative of thosrepresente darkest moments in her life in this book. let's say one of her husbands breaking her jaw. as they called it back then, back alley abortion and she is trying to escape.

so they are going to let me tell stories and the only thing she said if i am so sorry that you had so much strife as a child. i didn't know it. those are the people i'm proud to come from so bear with me every step of the way. questions. >> did the film picnic have anything to do -- the iconic film "picnic." >> no, i don't believe so. the themes of your book in this divide and do you see those reflective and other popular culture is now such as films and

novels? >> much of what i do as a journalist requires time simultaneously operating as a media critic, and that's because i take great issue with the way that the narratives are cast usually by upper-class people who might have the best of intentions, but nevertheless they don't bat an eye suggesting the working class is white or male or conservative. none of those things are true of course the weather is more a monolith and then another group and so i do feel like most of the portrayal that we see right now in the news media portrayal very much as a politicized one and had to do with the heated moment we were in as a country that even going back to my

childhood, i felt like anytime i saw where i was from it was a stereotype or a caricature. sometimes there are some classes and the done with a hateful spirit but more often than not it is storytellers who don't know any better. that's why we need diversification on the colleges in the newsrooms into so many so many other spaces that hold power in a society. we often consider diversity as we showed along the lines of race and gender and other aspects of identity but it's only fair until we are acknowledging the class that intersects with all of the above and also is a particular conundrum in this moment of historic wealth and the quality so most of the stories right now don't get it right because

there's nobody from those places or experience that antipathy privilege of telling them. >> it is so nice to read your book. i wanted to ask about the writing process. it feels like you took 15 years to write this because it is so authentic. and i loved the approach you take writing it to an unborn daughter and so i'm wondering at what point in the process did you choose to do that? >> i'm a former english professor and so the writers among us particularly enjoy this question. if you read this book you will

believe me if i say i will shoot you straight. i knew when i was a child i was going to write this book. of course i didn't know what it was going to look like or the relevance it would have, but i would say to my grandfather someday i'm going to write a book about our family. i strategically made decisions along the way in order for it to become a reality, so i was the editor of a rural high school newspaper and i doubled in journalism and creative writing that in the grades the fact and research base on the fiction in an artful narrative storytelling abyss and ththat is in the intef the core of this book so that is a long way of saying that it was during the years as a journalist but funny enough in some parts served to pay the bills.

things like artistic resources and when you have to go wait tables and as a freelance journalist that inherently slows down the process but the beauty of it and what i think of it now as a greek term that forced the along the wamealong the way to d awareness and language for articulating why i sensed that my family's story might matter which is all these issues of class and politics and place than i ever could have articulated as a young person when i was trying to get this going. so those pieces of the puzzle have a very personal passage some of which now there are many places that are almost verbatim of something i approach like my senior year and the passages

that are a little bit more of a big picture coach commentary or social analysis came a little later and then they were not quite chilling. i could sense that i published those got a little attention around the world and i found this correlation in the process. the more i thought like i was going to throw up the night they came out -- [laughter] the more people appreciated them, and of course none of that have thad to do with vulnerabild opening up a wound that many people. for different reasons called shame. if it were published tomorrow i wouldn't feel like i need to grow up and must be a problem.

[laughter] so it was like keeping the reader at arms length with a finality and then it was like this aspect of my psyche that has been so deep that i almost never even consciously think about that is very true dialogue that i had growing up with this was the daughter. i used to say to myself when i was a teenager and had to make a difficult decision in some other family parents would come in and help with i would say to myself what would i want for my daughter with what i tell my daughter to do, and if that was my way of the context of the world where my own value would so unacknowledged in this society on meritocracy that's just not losers, doesn't it and i absorbed that so this same

conversatiothe sameconversationa way i knew she would be so secret i would do anything to be read by her and i could write the challenge more reliably than to the challenge of doing right by myself and that guided me for many years. i felt like yes i'm definitely going to throw up if people read this. mission accomplished. [laughter] any other questions? i'm about 100 pages into the book right now and one of the things i remember reading you clearly right, you have so much

sympathy for the amount of suffering that your family and people that grew up in a situation have been through. i'm curious if you have any sense of survivor's guilt. >> what an interesting question and an important one. whawhat i described in i'm hearg from so many people the particulars are the same. since we are living in a class structure, millions of people have an experience of more than one round up the ladder of upward mobility or downward mobility, and these things are not static. i hear from a lot of people who do have precisely that survival skill as she called it and for

escaping the same outcomes that their beloved family members experienced. it was kind of like the defining moment having a different life experience and my family is. as i described in the book for some kids supposedly that is like the wildest and fun years and they were the hardest of mine. i loved being a student and academia but as i say in the book there is a reason that so few people may this perceived divide in any lasting way and it's because ibecause it is a vl crossing. it means you are accomplishing the goals that are essential to

your own survival and well-being but then by definition no longer the same as the people you once loved in terms of experience and just maybe even language like i tell people i speak two versions oto versionsof english, country. tonight i am mostly using an e.. [laughter] that was painful for me like i said i wanted to get out. i loved my home and my family and get there is something about my past that the painful aspects means i and people who share my story never completely belonged.

it is in part because my family is lovely and happy for me and i'm honestly amazed and delighted that i get to do this for a living. [applause] i wonder if you could take off your hat and put on your journalist hack. you mentioned your grandma betty and how she benefited to improve

her economic place etc.. we are at a time depending on how you look at it, we live in a place where racism doesn't exist anymore. >> you mean what some people say. >> we have the chief justice of the supreme court said racism doesn't exist. >> i think we absolutely are not. the games that were made by women of color and other historically marginalized groups were made in part because the federal government said if we leave this up to local

communities, the child isn't going to get done so we have to say they must integrate and must be allowed to work in peace spaces, so i do sense that we are at a moment where there is a story about the country that is maybe short term memory tests like the gains we've made our because o of those programs ando therefore they should remain or be even more robust as opposed to claiming we are post race for post-gender in terms of the social hierarchy and therefore turn down the public programs. when i was an undergraduate at the university of kansas, i was a straight a student and at that moment i was excelling i didn't know what the term graduate

student meant. so much for kids who come from places like i do just like the language was so foreign i was putting the biggest dream i could think for myself. there was a program on the campus i believe is still there and somehow i found them in my senior year of college they encouraged me to apply to graduate school. now i will confess that i had no intention of going to graduate school once he explained to me thoughwhat it was. [laughter] but it came with a summer research stipend where i wouldn't have to break my back at the grain elevator during the week harvest or be objectified

as a female server in the service industry all summer. instead i could use this type into research this book and i also got an undergraduate research award. i can't remember if that goes to the college of liberal arts and science. that was a program that played a pivotal role in my life i'd like to point out like some people would love to look at a story and say you work hard. the way i look at it i'm not here to talk about an individual triumph. on a game here as someone that represents the exception to the rule in terms of dogs of -- fogs of my job now is to shine a light on the fact for the people that don't have a privilege of being at the podium.

[applause] the book came out i read an advanced copy. how many people have read the book so far? i intimated that have lived most of my life in kansas and i don't think even a lot of kansans know the story. so this is such a powerful and timely story we implore you to sell out tonight. [applause]

think you. [applause] a popular hiking spot can be seen from one of the areas. we continue our special look at hawaii with author on the story of the last hawaiian monarch. my book starts and ends with my own narrative of growing up is hard to give just trying to find out w