Jay Luke is a musician and artist from Throop, Pa. A graduate from Marywood University, Jay is very active in all things art, whether it be through painting, performing with his band, or through his day job as a graphic designer. As a project engineer of the Olyphant Coal Miner Memorial Association, he has delved deeply into the origins of the area and the forgotten histories of the towns around him.

Passionate about not letting future generations forget their local origins, he took on this project to reconnect readers to the past. As writer and poet Wendell Berry once said, “The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”