Kendall Young Library will host Ted Genoways, author of the 2019 All Iowa Reads title, This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm, on Oct. 16 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at Kendall Young Library in Webster City.

Genoways will discuss his book and the rapidly changing landscape of small, traditional farming operations, as it unfolds day to day. Time will be built in for questions from the audience.

This Blessed Earth follows one family from harvest to harvest and shows the triumphs and challenges of modern farming. Far from an isolated refuge beyond the reach of global events, the family farm is increasingly at the crossroads of emerging technologies and international detente.

Genoways is an award-winning poet, journalist, and editor. A contributing writer at Mother Jones and The New Republic, as well as editor-at-large at Pacific Standard, his work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, and the Washington Post Book World. He is a winner of a National Press Club Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and he has received fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

In addition to This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm (2017), he is the author of two books of poems and the nonfiction books The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food (2014) and Walt Whitman and the Civil War (2009). He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and son.

Established in 2003, the All Iowa Reads program from the Iowa Center for the Book encourages Iowans to come together in their communities to read and talk about a single book title in the same year.