Art Cullen

Art Cullen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, editor of The Storm Lake Times (a family-run weekly newspaper in small-town Iowa), and author of the new book, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.

Art has made it his life’s work to ask the big questions, speak truth to power, and share the struggles and successes of his unique community of Storm Lake, Iowa (Census pop. 10,076). His new book is part cultural history, part memoir — it explores the themes of family, community, immigration and diversity, the meaning of home, and the Heartland’s turbulent history and promising progressive future. 

Drawing from the stories of one special small town on the “broken prairie,” and his family’s perspectives from their small-town newspaper business, Art hopes to inspire a broader sense of dialogue, renewal and understanding of rural places. 

In politically divisive times, when Americans from Red States and Blue States often feel estranged from each other, Art Cullen’s book attempts to show an optimistic way forward — that there is still abundant hope in the Heartland. 

This is a book that America needs now, written by a small-town newspaper editor who has earned journalism’s highest honor.

Book

Art Cullen’s new book, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper, (coming October 2, 2018) is a culmination of his 38 years of professional experience as a reporter, editor, observer and inquisitor of life in the Heartland. In the tradition of What’s the Matter With Kansas? and White Trash, Cullen has written a one-of-a-kind story of the Heartland’s turbulent past and promising future — illustrating the intrinsic decency and surprisingly progressive potential of this often overlooked and misunderstood region. If you’re looking for progressive signs of hope in Trump’s America, you can find them in Storm Lake.

Part memoir, part cultural history, Storm Lake is a story of how the rural Midwest has been washed out over the past 40 years — family farms disappearing to the consolidation of industrial agriculture; small towns bleeding jobs and population; a once-comfortable way of life supplanted by low-wage meatpacking jobs, environmental degradation, and a cultural sense of loss and upheaval. It’s a story of how the Farm Crisis (“a 1980s rural depression that saw farmers hanging themselves in barns”) damaged the economy and psyche of the Midwest in ways that many communities have still not recovered from, about the Red and Blue roller coaster of Iowa politics and how right-wing anti-immigrant voices like Congressman Steve King became a harbinger for the rise of Donald Trump. It’s a story about family and community and survival, and how climate change now threatens all that the Heartland has built — and the very notion of food security in America. 

But it’s not just a story of struggle — it’s a story of successes and surprising sources of optimism for those who still believe in the promise of America. The small town of Storm Lake emerges, vividly described as a surprisingly diverse and progressively minded place, with a dynamic and growing community enhanced by immigration from Mexico, Laos and other countries. It’s a story of how immigration revitalizes America culturally and spiritually, and how a small newspaper plays its role in investigating, explaining and sharing the life of the community around it.

Anyone who wants to feel a new sense of optimism and find fresh insights about where America’s Heartland has come from — and how a more inclusive, authentic populism could be the guide to a progressive resurgence in rural America — must read Storm Lake.

Praise