A lot of West Virginia is untouched. It doesn't have as many strip malls, it has these old towns that feel like it used to be how it looked. Charleston has this river that runs through it, and it's really beautiful.

Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it's a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can't see from any highway.

Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.

I grew up in Palestine, West Virginia, which is mostly a farming community; there aren't a lot of jobs.

People in West Virginia do have cars. We have indoor plumbing. We even use knives and forks.