Beth Macy

Journalist and author of Factory Man, cited in What I Found in a Thousand Towns as a fellow chronicler of American manufacturing-town life. In that book, Macy did a reading at one of the author’s concerts and concluded with a line the book holds up as a thesis on community resilience: “People and communities prosper only when they celebrate a diverse range of equal voices.” The quote anchors the book’s argument that the strongest towns are the ones that welcome the contributions of their citizens.

Context: Beth Macy is an American author and former Roanoke Times reporter known for Factory Man (2014), about a Virginia furniture maker’s fight against globalization, and Dopesick (2018), about the opioid epidemic in Appalachia. Her work documents the human cost of economic decline in small-town and rural America.

Where this appears

• What I Found in a Thousand Towns — quoted (as author of Factory Man) on diverse, equal voices as the foundation of community prosperity