CATHERINE YOUNG
CATHERINE YOUNG is a disabled writer, ecologist, and songcrafter whose work is infused with a keen sense of place. She is author of the literary memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal (Torrey House Press), the eco-poetry collection Geosmin (Midwest Book Awards Silver Medal winner), and her prose and poetry is published nationally and internationally. She 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. She deeply believes in the use of story and art as tools for transforming the world, and she holds concern for water. Rooted in farm life, Catherine writes with a keen sense of place and lives with her family in the ancient unglaciated Driftless Area of Wisconsin.
BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
BLACK DIAMONDS:
A Childhood Colored by Coal
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.
"Young’s memoir of her hometown is as powerful a picture as Inness’ painting, revealing its harsh transformation a century later."
—BOOKLIST