Overview

"A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Award winner ""Young's memoir of her hometown is as powerful a picture as Inness' painting, revealing its harsh transformation a century later.""--BOOKLIST In 1855, the landscape painter George Inness began work on his commissioned painting The Lackawanna Valley. A century later, a girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania, looks out over her coal-strewn homeland wishing for beauty and wondering where the artist had stood with his canvas. The interplay between the two stories is at the heart of Catherine Young's memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored By Coal. Young invites readers into a world now vanished, but which lingers in shimmering portraits. A lyric work of environmental history, Black Diamonds gives voice to the birthplace of the industrial revolution in North America and the consequences for the people and the forgotten valley that once powered the nation."

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9781948814836

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Reviews

I read Catherine Young's vivid and moving memoir of her days in the Lackawanna Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania with a growing sense of excitement. Young is a poet of superb gifts, and those gifts come into operation here, informing her prose at every turn. Black Diamonds is a book to treasure, so full of stories, rich in memory and landscape, written in a style that has, for me, almost an hallucinatory feeling. She takes us back to a unique time and place, and we don't want to leave the page. This is a book to read and read again. --Jay Parini, author of BORGES AND ME: AN ENCOUNTER Together with George Inness' famous The Lackawanna Valley painting, Catherine young vividly depicts the anthracite coal town of her childhood. Vignettes of Young's girlhood open a window into the realities of growing up in Inness' landscape 100 years after the painting's creation. As she recounts life in coal country in the 1960s, she deftly weaves together threads of hardship and comfort, grief and acceptance, and change and stagnation. With poetic and evocative prose, Young's Black Diamonds reveals how coal - like its black dust - is inescapable. --Aryn G. N. Schriner, University of Maryland

Author Information

Catherine Young worked as a national park ranger, farmer, educator, and mother before putting her heart into her writing. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and holds degrees in Geography, Environmental Science, and Education. Catherine is author of the ecopoetry collection, Geosmin. She deeply believes in the use of story and art as tools for transforming the world, and she holds concern for water. Rooted in farmlife, Catherine writes with a keen sense of place and lives with her family in the Driftless region of Wisconsin.

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