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.

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 literary memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal and 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.

Jean Feraca is an award-winning broadcast journalist, writer and public speaker who became famous as a talk show host on Wisconsin Public Radio as the host of Conversations with Jean Feraca and Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders. She is the author of 3 books of poetry and the memoir, I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death, and the Radio. She retired from WPR in 2012 and is now active in The Prison Ministry Project. In 2016 she became a benedictine oblate of Holy Wisdom Monastery in Middleton, Wisconsin. She is married to the brilliant geneticist Alan Attie and has two sons: Ottoman historian Giancarlo Casale and noise artist Dominick Fernow. Bowie, her beautiful white cat with one green eye and one dreamy blue eye is named for David Bowie.

Livestream: Catherine Young with Jean Feraca