Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains

Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County is the poorest county in Kentucky and the second poorest in the country. Buildings are crumbling and fields sit vacant, as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women are finding creative ways to subsist in their hollers in the hills. Chambers grew up amidst these hollers, and through the women who raised her, she traces her own path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. With her ＂hill women＂ values guiding her, Chambers graduated from Harvard Law, but moved back home to help her fellow rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Here she breaks down the myth of the ＂hillbilly＂ and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future. -- Adapted from jacket.

Cassie Chambers grew up in eastern Kentucky. She graduated from Yale College, the Yale School of Public Health, the London School of Economics, and Harvard Law School, where she was president of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, a student-run law firm that represents low-income clients. Chambers then received a Skadden Fellowship to return to Kentucky to do legal work with domestic violence survivors in rural communities. In 2018, she helped pass Jeanette’s Law, which eliminated the requirement that domestic violence survivors pay an incarcerated spouse’s legal fees in order to get a divorce. She lives in Louisville with her husband and their son.