500 feet underground, Jeanne Marie Laskas asked a coal miner named Smitty, “Do you consider it’s weird that people know so little about you?” He replied, “I don’t believe people know an excessive amount of about the way the whole damn country works.”

Hidden America intends to fix that. Like John McPhee and Susan Orlean, Laskas dives deep into her subjects and emerges with character-driven narratives that are gripping, funny, and revelatory. In Hidden America, the stories are about the individuals who make our lives operate every day-and yet we barely think about them.

Laskas spent weeks in an Ohio coal mine and on an Alaskan essential oil rig; inside a Maine migrant labor camp, a Tx beef ranch, the air traffic control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport,

a California landfill, an Arizona gun store, the cab of the long-haul truck in Iowa, as well as the stadium of the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders. Cheerleaders? Yes. They, as well, are hidden America, and you will be amazed with what Laskas lets you know about them: concealed no longer.