Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal - Paperback
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Award-Winning Environmental Memoir of Coal Country Pennsylvania
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.
A Lyric Work of Environmental History
Young invites readers into a world now vanished, but which lingers in shimmering portraits. This lyric work of environmental history 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. Through personal narrative and historical reflection, Black Diamonds explores the transformation of the Lackawanna Valley and the lasting impact of coal mining on communities and landscapes.
Memoir That Bridges Past and Present
The memoir weaves together two timelines: the 19th-century creation of Inness's commissioned landscape painting and a mid-20th-century childhood in the same transformed valley. This dual narrative structure reveals how industrial progress reshaped both the physical landscape and the lives of those who called it home. The book serves as both personal memoir and environmental documentation of a region that fueled America's industrial growth.
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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