I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other.

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.

I've been a conservative in West Virginia before that was popular. I've seen a change in West Virginia. Not a change in John Raese, but a change in West Virginia and a change in America.

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

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