May 7
By Niki King
This February, I had the honor of seeing Saro Lynch-Thomason, an Appalachian activist and musician, perform Blair Pathways, a traveling multi-media show at Berea College that she developed to bring attention to the historic and endangered Blair Mountain.
by Beth Newberry
Judy Bonds of Whitesville, W.Va., was an activist and community organizer, who in the latter part of her 58 years, tried to end the Mountaintop Removal (MTR) method of strip mining, particularly in the Coal River valley of southern West Virginia. While her work and life were centered on the mountains surrounding her ancestral home of Marfork Holler, her organizing work had national and international tendrils. She died a year ago of cancer on Jan. 3, 2011.
by David Flores
“Meeting someone like Judy is a motivating thing in life that makes you refocus your work, and I hoped, after spending the day with her, that my work would become more focused and I feel like it has,” says David Flores, a native of Louisville, Ky., and resident of New York City since 2005, who traveled on assignment as a photographer to profile activist Judy Bonds over Labor Day weekend of 2004 in her hometown of Whitesville, W.Va., and the surrounding region.
The HillVille 