Book Signing with Raymond Thompson Jr.

Name: Book Signing with Raymond Thompson Jr.
Start: 2024-06-22T14:00:00-04:00
Location: 226 Capitol St, Charleston, WV, United States, West Virginia 25301

Schedule

Sat Jun 22 2024 at 02:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

226 Capitol St, Charleston, WV, United States, West Virginia 25301 | Charleston, WV

We are excited to welcome Raymond Thompson Jr., author of Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster. Appalachian Ghost, published by the University Press of Kentucky earlier this year, is “a gut-wrenching account of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, one of the United States' worst industrial accidents” (Change Seven).
In Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel Disaster, author Raymond Thompson Jr. explores the possibilities of the Hawk’s Nest tragedy by reviving the faces and spaces of Hawk's Nest. Using primary source materials to re-create the workers' experiences in photographs, Thompson recontextualizes archival images to present a counter-archive that positions the Black experience at Hawk's Nest within the larger story of the American labor landscape. His photographs and poetry give voice to the silenced, resisting revisionist narratives that often ignore the sacrifices of African Americans and erase their instrumental role in the development of America's infrastructure.
“This is an affecting, evocative, and visually stimulating homage to the forgotten laborers, at least two-thirds of them African American, who died because of their involvement in the construction of the three-mile Hawk's Nest Tunnel between 1930 and 1935. Ably assisted by poetry, photographs, and an engaging narrative, this book calls to me, and I suggest it will do so to anyone who is conversant with the history—even in a general sense—of the unprotected Black industrial worker in southern West Virginia.” –Cicero M. Fain III, author of Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story
Raymond Thompson Jr., assistant professor of photojournalism at University of Texas at Austin, is an artist, educator, and visual journalist. He holds an MFA in photography from West Virginia University and an MA in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. He has worked as a freelance photographer for the New York Times, the Intercept, NBC News, NPR, Politico, ProPublica, the Nature Conservancy, the ACLU, WBEZ, Google, Merrell, and the Associated Press.