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“A dazzling portrait of a Midwestern city whose relationships among socio-economics, religion, civil rights, and class are consistently complex” (Kirkus).

 St. Louis is a fragmented place. It’s physically dissected by rivers, highways, walls, and fences, but it’s also a place where one’s race, class, religion, and zip code may as well be cards in a rigged poker game, where the losers face a dramatically shorter life expectancy. But despite these many divisions, St. Louis can also be a city of warmth, love, and beauty―especially in its contrasts.

 This collection features nearly seventy essays penned by St. Louis writers, journalists, clerics, poets, and activists including Aisha Sultan, Galen Gritts, Vivian Gibson, Maja Sadikovic, Nartana Premachandra, Sophia Benoit, Robert Langellier, Samuel Autman, Umar Lee, and more. Here you’ll learn about: • The rent strike of 1969 
 • Religious life in Pruitt-Igoe public housing 
 • Protest art in Ferguson 
 • Segregation in the Vandeventer neighborhood 
 • A church closing in Kinloch 
 • And much more.

Belt Publishing

Belt City Anthologies

The St. Louis Anthology

A collection of essays, art, stories, and poetry that offer a nuanced portrait of Milwaukee in all its hope and hurt, weirdness and wonder.

The Milwaukee Anthology presents a rich mosaic of one of America’s toughest zip codes. With a diverse range of perspectives, authors and artists share honest first-hand stories about Riverwest, Sherman Park, Hmong New Year’s shows, 7 Mile Fair, the Rolling Mill commemoration, and much more.

 Edited by Justin Kern, and with more than fifty contributors including Dasha Kelly, Pardeep Kaleka, and Michael Perry, this collection includes stories about: • Redlining in the city 
 • Painting a community mural in Sherman Park 
 • Reflections after the Oak Creek Sikh Temple Shooting 
 • The city’s upstart microbrewing industry 
 • The rise of Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks

The Milwaukee Anthology

“The ultimate (literary) tour guide to the neighborhoods and wild places, history and politics, culture and cuisine, music and myths of the Twin Cities” (Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding).

 In recent years, Minneapolis has become one of America’s literary powerhouses. With over fifty poems and essays, Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology collects some of the most exciting work being done in, or about, Minneapolis and the Twin Cities area. The narratives delve into the complexities of Minneapolis life—with threads that stretch back not just to Scandinavia, but across the world.

 This volume’s contributors include Marlon James, Shannon Gibney, Kelly Barnhill, James Wright, and many more. Collectively, they have won, or been shortlisted for, the Newbery Award, the Man Booker Prize, the Pulitzer, the Caldecott Award, the National Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award, among other awards. The wide-ranging stories featured here include: • A tour through Prince’s Minneapolis 
 • The story of the Metrodome’s demolition 
 • A story of a Somali immigrant’s journey to Eden Prairie 
 • Eating Halva on Lake Street

Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology

Samuel A. Love

“A strong series of personal essays, historical exploration, nature writing, and photography” exploring the Indiana city (Chicago Review of Books).

 Once the second-largest city in Indiana, and home to the world’s largest steel mill, Gary has suffered greatly in the postindustrial global economy. Population numbers now approach pre–Great Depression lows. Large swathes of its land are urban prairie, and a recent survey found a quarter of its built environment is in a dilapidated or dangerous condition. But Gary is also a national center of Black culture and political power. It is home to the Indiana Dunes National Park and globally rare ecosystems. Union, community organizing, and environmental justice struggles there have profoundly shaped social and political life in the United States. 

 Edited by Samuel A. Love, The Gary Anthology’s contributors include essayists, poets, and journalists, but also graffiti writers, ministers, activists, organizers, and steel workers. Their insights into the city complicate our simplified narratives about violence and urban decay, offering readers the chance to hear from those who are reshaping the city from the bottom up. 
 A nuanced look of a city that is full of everyday joys and tragedies and a vibrant rebuke to stale notions that Gary is “dead.”

The Gary Anthology

Shannon Shelton Miller

Stories, poems, and essays that pay homage to the innovative spark and high-flying spirit that help the Midwest’s Gem City survive and thrive. 
 
 A part of Belt’s City Anthology Series, The Dayton Anthology offers a portrait of a city recovering from the twin 2019 crises of devastating tornadoes and the mass shooting that took the lives of nine residents in the Oregon District.
 
 In over fifty essays and poems, contributors reflect on these traumas and the longer-term ills of disinvestment and decay that have plagued Dayton and the Miami Valley for years. But they also draw our attention to the resilience of the people who call Dayton home. This is the city that brought the world the Wright brothers’ invention of flight, the cash register, and the hydraulic pump. It also gave us the soaring poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the comedy of Dave Chappelle. Edited by Shannon Shelton Miller and with contributions from Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley and former Ohio Governor Bob Taft.
 
 A delightful tour of a city that never counts itself out, that captures the true diversity of Dayton’s residents.

The Dayton Anthology

An evocative collection of essays, poetry, photography and more from some of Akron, Ohio’s best authors, artists, and activists.

 Between 1910 and 1920, Akron, Ohio, tripled in size, making it the fastest growing city in the United States. Its period of rapid growth coincided with the expansion of the rubber and tire industry, which in turn corresponded with the automobile boom. But since the mid-1970s, industry has abandoned Akron, and the city has lost thirty-one percent of its population. Once-opulent neighborhoods are now swaths of abandoned homes, and the factories that made Akron the Rubber Capital of the World lie dormant.

 Edited by Jason Segedy, and bringing together established writers like Rita Dove and David Giffels with the work of emerging voices, The Akron Anthology collects essays, poems, and photographs from the writers, artists, and activists who call Akron home. Here you’ll find stories that include: • The diaries of a doorman 
 • The trials and triumphs of refugees who have relocated to the city 
 • A portrait of Jamie Stillman, world-renowned effects pedal manufacturer 
 • Archie the talking snowman.

The Akron Anthology

“A lively grab bag of essays, fiction and poetry that reads at times like a who’s who of contemporary Chicago writers/residents”(Chicago Tribune).

 Chicago is a city built on meat, railroads, and steel, on opportunity and exploitation. But its identity has long involved so much more than manufacturing. Today, the city continues to lure new residents from around the world, and from across a region rocked by recession and deindustrialization.

Rust Belt Chicago collects essays, fiction, and poetry from more than fifty writers who speak directly to the concerns the city shares with the Midwest at large, and the elements that set it apart. With contributions from writers like Aleksandar Hemon, Kathleen Rooney, and Zoe Zolbrod, here you’ll find stories about: • Buying Bread on Devon Street 
 • The Cantinas of Pilsen 
 • Bike commutes through the North Side 
 • Adventures on the El. 
 Writing with affection, frustration, anger, and joy, the writers in this collection capture all the harmony and dissonance that define one cacophonous place.

Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology

A part of Belt's City Anthology Series, a unique take on the South Dakota town residents call "the Best Little City in America." In 1992, Money magazine named Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the best place to

City of Hustle: A Sioux Falls Anthology

A unique perspective of the Motor City, this anthology combines stories told by both longtime residents and newcomers from activists to teachers to artists to students. While Detroit has always been rich in stories, too often those stories are told back to the city by outsiders looking in, believing they can explain Detroit back to itself. As editor, Anna Clark writes in the introduction, "These are the stories we tell each other over late nights at the pub and long afternoons on the porch. We share them in coffee shops, at church social hours, in living rooms, and while waiting for the bus. These are stories full of nodding asides and knowing laughs. These are stories addressed to the rhetorical "you"‚Äïwith the ratcheted up language that comes with it‚Äïand these are stories that took real legwork to investigate . . . You will not find 'positive' stories about Detroit in this collection, or 'negative' ones. But you will find true stories." Featuring essays, photographs, art, and poetry by Grace Lee Boggs, John Carlisle, Desiree Cooper, Dream Hampton, Steve Hughes, Jamaal May, Tracie McMillan, Marsha Music, Shaka Senghor, Thomas J. Sugrue, and many others.

A Detroit Anthology

An anthology of essays & poetry offering a reconsideration of one of America’s most misunderstood cities.

 Is Indianapolis just another midwestern city to fly over on the way to bigger and better destinations? Or is it, as locals know, a place where different peoples and ideals converge to create a rich cultural center? The Indianapolis Anthology showcases Naptown’s vibrancy and diversity with pieces from journalists, poets, historians, established community voices, and first-time writers. The Circle City is more than the home of the Indianapolis 500, John Dillinger, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Kurt Vonnegut, Prozac, and Wonder Bread. In these pages, you’ll find: 

 · lawn chairs in the beds of pick-ups 

 · Punk rock in Naptown 

 · suffragists and entrepreneurs 

 · cement pietàs 

 · dog bakeries and yoga studios 

 · red brick bungalows and war memorials 

 · steakburgers and Mexican seafood; pho and sauerbraten 

 · and more 

 In other words, you'll find images from a city that is truly a cross section of today’s America. Edited by Norman “Buzz” Minnick and with contributions from Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes, Michael Martone, and Karen Kovacik. 
 An insiders’ look that will make you see a great midwestern city in a brand-new light.