Cecilia Jaswa Rusnak

In the 1940s, Muriel Sheppard, a journalist and wife of a mining engineer wrote about the industrialized Monongahela Valley of southwestern Pennsylvania. She tried to portray this valley as a place where people lived out full lives, a place where people were not just captured and defined by employment in the coal industry. This book is significant to me because this is where I grew up. The Monongahela Valley with its coal and agricultural enterprises is where I first developed a fascination for landscapes, and for the ways people connect with landscapes to establish places for themselves.