About David Boles
David Boles was born on the braided prairies of Nebraska and has spent four decades as a writer, publisher, and cultural critic. He holds an MFA from Columbia University. He founded Prairie Voice in 2024.
The publication emerges from a conviction that rural American life is examined too rarely and understood too little. When national media arrives in the heartland, it typically extracts what confirms existing narratives and leaves. Prairie Voice stays.
The work here is documentary in the oldest sense: bearing witness, recording what exists, attending to places and people that American discourse treats as backdrop rather than subject. The editorial tradition is the Farm Security Administration photography of the 1930s, the WPA state guidebooks, the work of writers who believed that where people live shapes how they think without determining what they can become.
Prairie Voice covers the prairie as it actually operates: the hidden economies, the agricultural-industrial systems, the military infrastructure buried beneath wheat fields, the medical networks stretched beyond capacity, the communities maintaining coherence against centrifugal forces. The publication does not romanticize rural life or pathologize it. Both approaches refuse to see what is actually there.
The name carries a double meaning. This is a voice from the prairie, but it is also the voice of the prairie itself, the voice of land and weather and distance, the voice that speaks in seasons rather than news cycles. That voice has something to say about patience, about scale, about what endures. Prairie Voice exists to make that audible.
Why subscribe?
Prairie Voice publishes original journalism and essays about rural American life. Each edition arrives by email.
The coverage is specific: agricultural economics, rural healthcare systems, energy infrastructure, the communities that form around these industries and institutions. The approach is documentary. We report what exists rather than what confirms existing assumptions about the heartland.
Every article begins free and open. Subscribers unlock the full text. This model lets readers sample the work before committing and sustains the journalism that makes Prairie Voice possible. Paid subscriptions fund longer investigations, fair compensation for contributors, and independence from advertising.
If you believe that what happens in rural America matters to the rest of the country, and that it deserves coverage as rigorous as any city receives, Prairie Voice is for you.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
