I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.

In West Virginia, the most vulnerable people we have are people who get up every morning and go to work.

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

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.

I'm still very much a West Virginia boy. I haven't forgotten my roots, because that's really who I am.

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