Cynthia M. Duncan is a sociologist and founding director of the Carsey Institute for Families and Communities at the University of New Hampshire. She is research director at AGree, an initiative bringing together diverse interests to transform food and agricultural policy in he United States. First published in 1999, Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America examined the nature of poverty through the stories of real people in three remote rural areas of the United States: New England, Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta. In this second edition, Duncan returns to the communities she visited 20 years ago to see what has changed and what has not.