Appalachia

- Crystal Good at home, Charleston Gazette, 2017.
https://www.wvgazettemail.com/_arts__entertainment/poet-s-identity-quest-helped-her-find-fellow-black-appalachian-poets/article_fe04859a-0422-53f9-9b09-49b389311725.html


- WV Public Broadcasting, 'Crystal Good On Returning Home To Launch the Publication ‘Black By God’, Dec. 16, 2021. Ed.

The first time Crystal Good left West Virginia—like, really left—she was 13. Up until then, apart from trips to Myrtle Beach for vacations, she really hadn’t spent time outside of her small town in Kanawha County. “Growing up in St. Albans was a safe place,” Good said. But the only markers she had for success and beauty were the homecoming queens, the blonde, blue-eyed beauties. She wasn’t that; she’s Black, & said she felt different from most of the other teenagers. Then, Good won a modeling contest, & that took her to New York City to sign with an agency. At age 13, she worked as a model with Ralph Lauren & Calvin Klein.

She says the trip opened her eyes to a totally different world, and a new perception of herself. “What happened to me in that experience was that my idea of beauty shifted,” Good said. “I recognized that beauty was not just my homecoming queen.” Good concluded “that I was a pretty girl too.” That experience in New York gave Good a new sense of a world, bigger than her hometown. “I think St Albans gave me a way to look at the world, & then recognize that it was a very small perspective. It was a valid perspective, but a very small perspective. And I think that's the beauty of hometowns. Is that once you sort of experience a bigger world, you can cherish the things that were special & different.”

Good returned from that modeling trip in New York, with big dreams. She wanted to continue her modeling career & also become a writer. As a teenager, she even considered trying to raise money to purchase the last Black newspaper in West Virginia, The Beacon Digest, which went out of business in the mid-1990s. But it took leaving again, 3 decades later at age 45, to set her back on a path to fulfilling that dream of running a Black paper. This time, she left for California. She moved to Los Angeles in Dec. 2019. Good said her time there was affirming. “I was in a space where people believed in creativity & creative ideas. I needed that energy. I needed to know that things were happening in the world, & that I could be a part of it with my story.”

Good had felt stuck, creatively, while living in WV. Staying in CA for a short time gave her the boost she needed. But she felt pulled back. And she had a plan: to launch a newspaper called 'Black By God,' The West Virginian. It’s the only newspaper in the state that intentionally centers non-white voices. “I know that this is needed, because how many black journalists are working in WV right now?” she said. Good only knows of one fulltime Black journalist currently working in the state. She hopes that eventually, 'Black By God' will grow so she can hire more writers & editors. Her 2nd print issue, which was published in early Dec., features stories about Black culture, health care & history. There are also white voices speaking to anti-racism in the papers’ opinion section. The past several weeks she’s been distributing the free papers across the state...
https://www.wvpublic.org/section/arts-culture/2021-12-16/crystal-good-on-returning-home-to-launch-the-publication-black-by-god