Jack reaches national audience with new book about shifting rural landscapes

Jun 11, 2013

Zachary Michael Jack, North Central College associate professor of English, authored “The Midwest Farmer’s Daughter: In Search of an American Icon,” a book about the shifting landscape of rural America.

In his new book published by Purdue University Press, Jack unearths the untold history and renewed cultural currency of an American icon at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the United States are woman-owned. He offers an eclectic account equal parts cultural history, memoir of the author’s own farm upbringing, and research into pressing agricultural, environmental, and rural sociological trends as they affect farm families past and present.

Listeners to Illinois Public Radio, Iowa Public Radio and Harvest Public Media heard Jack give interviews about this far-reaching book this spring.