ABOUT SARAH:
Sarah Neidhardt grew up in Arkansas and Northern California and moved to Fairfield, California, and later the East Bay. A gap year after high school turned into a gap five years while she worked in a daycare, a refinery, and a bookstore. After earning her BA from Oberlin College in 1999, Sarah returned to California where she worked as a secretary and paralegal in American Indian and business law. She also interned at the iconic California indie press Heyday Books and worked for Apress.
Sarah moved with her husband to Portland, Oregon, in 2007 and freelanced as a proofreader and copyeditor for Heyday Books and others. When her son was born in 2008, she became a full-time mother and began writing Twenty Acres, transcribing hundreds of family letters from as far back as the 1840s, and creating a large urban garden with not a vegetable in sight. She was a finalist for the 2016 New Letters Dorothy Cappon Prize for Nonfiction and the 2016 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Nonfiction. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and teenage son.
ABOUT TWENTY ACRES:
Sarah Neidhardt was an infant when her parents joined the growing back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. Uprooting their young family to move from Colorado Springs to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, they built a cabin, grew their own food, and for years strove to escape their former lives and achieve an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency.
In Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods, bohemian counterculture meets pioneer homemaking. Neidhardt revisits her childhood with compassion and candor, drawing upon a trove of family letters to retrace her parents’ journey from their affluent youths, to their embrace of rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society. As she comes to better understand her family and the movement that shaped them, Neidhardt reveals both the treasures and tolls of an unconventional, pastoral life.
Learn more about Sarah at her website here: https://sarahneidhardt.com/#aboutSarah.