Emma Copley Eisenberg

“I had a collection of ideas about West Virginia, but I had a hunch that they were all gross misinformation, plus none of them agreed: coal and the end of coal. Poverty and a mansion on a stripped mountain. Pickup trucks and VW buses. OxyContin and Jesus. Mother Jones and Don Blankenship. Knobby elbows and the fattest city in America.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia

“The idea of Appalachia is well understood; the real place, less so. It is a borderland, not truly of the South or the North, and West Virginia is the only state entirely within its bounds. Because of its enormous natural resources and their subsequent extraction, which has largely profited corporations based elsewhere, the relationship between the people of West Virginia and the broader United States of America is often compared to that between a colonized people and their colonizers. The programs of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty that funneled national dollars and aid workers to central Appalachia, though founded on humanitarian ideas, also furthered this troubled interdependency.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia