Writer: Anthony Taylor
Photos: Duane Tinkey
Sarah Booz is not a woman who is easy to miss. Small in stature but blessed with a big personality, a frenetic shock of curls and a penchant for distinctive glasses, the 40-year-old is no shrinking violet. She is also obviously, blatantly a New Yorker.
Except for a brief stint in Boston for school, Booz (pronounced “Bose,” like the speakers) spent the first 31 years of her life in and around Manhattan. As anybody who has met one can attest, native New Yorkers wear their hometown affiliation on their sleeve, and Booz is no different. Growing up in the nation’s largest city shaped her DNA. Her mother was in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” for crying out loud.
That’s why it’s so delightful to see the absolute abandon with which she has embraced Des Moines. In just three years here, Booz and her partner, artist Kyle Kirwan, have ensconced themselves at Mainframe Studios. She’s partnered with Catch Des Moines to hype local establishments and has amassed nearly 50,000 followers on TikTok. And it all started because she found a slice of home.
By the time Booz found Maccabee’s Kosher Deli on Polk Boulevard, she and Kirwan had already been in town for a couple of years. Mainframe was one of the biggest draws for the couple, but their search for a new home included a number of factors, including the cost of living, crime rate and culture. “I kept looking at all these ‘Top 10 Places to Live’ lists, and Des Moines was on every one,” she said.
But even though she’d come to appreciate DSM for its unique personality, there were always NYC things she assumed she’d have to do without.
Enter: Maccabee’s. “I found a New Yorker-owned Jewish deli in Des Moines, and I am so happy,” Booz (in floral-themed glasses) declares in a TikTok post in July 2023. In the video, she recounts how Rabbi Yossi Jacobson clocked her as a fellow New Yorker the instant she walked in. After the obligatory questions about where she grew up, the rabbi called out her order with perfect accuracy.
The TikTok post racked up more than 370,000 views and attracted attention from local news outlets and then from Catch Des Moines, which enlisted Booz to create a whole series of videos touting local businesses.
For her part, Booz can’t understand people who still call the city boring. “People will say to me, ‘There’s nothing to do in Des Moines,’ and I’m wondering, ‘What are you doing?’”
The city is still evolving, to be sure. But there are plenty of smart, talented, creative people around who are doing exactly that: shaping the city they want to live in. And whenever those people get together, Booz is often in the thick of it, soaking in the energy and wondering why more people aren’t joining in.
One area that gave Booz pause while she was deciding whether to move here was the state’s politics. She is unapologetically liberal and had some concerns about Iowa’s shift to the right since 2016.
But she isn’t the kind of person to just sit back and hope for the best. So, she and her friend Liz Fleming launched a podcast called “Iowa: We Can Do Better” and record it in Fleming’s apartment near El Bait Shop. Fleming grew up in Dubuque and moved to Des Moines around the same time Booz did. She is brilliant, confident and funny and has a TikTok following of her own; more than 82,000 follow her “Liz From Iowa” posts about everything from modern dating to her stint as a contestant on “The Floor,” the game show on Fox. She is also an advocate for women’s reproductive rights, voter registration and Palestine, so when she met Booz at an event at HoQ, some sort of collaboration was almost inevitable.
This fall their podcast dug deep into the campaigns for the Iowa House and Senate, and it was clear Booz had done her Iowa homework. She understood the local issues and channeled her media skills to support candidates that could color the state purple, if not blue, in the next few election cycles.
Political activism is just another part of who she is. “I was going to protests and doing a lot of shouting even in high school,” she said.
So does Booz feel like an Iowan yet? “Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m a New Yorker. There’s no helping it.”
But Des Moines is definitely home. She chose it intentionally, through a deliberate process. The move uprooted two lives and transplanted them to a place they used to know only as a dot on a map. As Booz sees it, if you’re going to swing that big, why wouldn’t you embrace the place with both arms?
“What’s going on at Mainframe and the Art Center and in the local music scene is all so exciting,” she said. “There’s a lot of potential here, and it’s just building up.”
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