Belt Publishing imprint: 24 books

Chicago is built on a foundation of meat and railroads and steel, on opportunity and exploitation – but its identity long ago stretched past manufacturing. Today, the city continues to lure new residents from around the world, and from across a region rocked by recession and deindustrialization....

Democratizing Cleveland: The Rise and Fall of Community Organizing in Cleveland, Ohio, 1975-1985 is the result of almost fifteen years of research on a topic that has been missing from local works on Cleveland history: the community organizing movement that put neighborhood concerns and neighborhood...

Buffalo is a magical place to be and this anthology walks the reader through the decades. The newness of the city is electrifying and sits atop a glorious history of power, disappointment, artistic flair, racial injustice and spicy chicken wings—and Buffalo has the Niagara Falls in its backyard....

Are you moving to Detroit because your rent is too high? Did you read somewhere that all you needed to buy a house was the change in your couch cushions? Are you terrified to live in a majority-black city? Welcome to Detroit! And welcome to the guidebook that you coastal transplants, wary suburbanites,...

Detroiters need to get to know their neighbors better. Wait — maybe that should be, Detroiters should get to know their neighborhoods better. It seems like everybody thinks they know the neighborhoods here, but because there are so many, the definitions become too broad, the characteristics become...

Much has been made of the 2016 electoral flip of traditionally Democratic states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio to tip Donald Trump into the presidency. Countless think pieces have explored this newfound exotic constituency of blue voters who swung red. But what about those who remain...

Unfolding the real Cleveland, this guidebook features listings of the city's best cultural hotspots as well as essays about residential communities. Readers will learn about places that are no longer in existence, the areas that are becoming increasingly popular, the natural history of Cleveland Heights,...

The Youngstown story often is told with a beginning in iron and steel and ending in decay with a subplot driven by violent mobsters and corrupt politicians. Aiming to provide a more well-rounded examination of Youngstown, this collection of essays provides an authentic look at the city through a diverse...

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...

Bringing emerging and established writers, artists, and photographer together, this collection explores what has happened in Akron, Ohio over the years and what may be happening in the future. Between 1910 and 1920, Akron was the fastest growing city in the United States, tripling in size and exploding...

America's first superheroes lived in the Midwest. There was Nanabozho, the Ojibway man-god who conquered the King of Fish, took control of the North Wind, and inspired Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. Paul Bunyan, the larger-than-life North Woods lumberjack, created Minnesota's 10,000 lakes with...

In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign...

In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants of a century past. But as the region has changed, so, in many ways, has its fiction. In this book, the author explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture has...

Pittsburgh is ever-changing — once dusted with soot from the mills, parts of the city now gleam with the polish of new technologies and little remains of what had been there before. The essays and artwork in this anthology aim for the surprising, elusive stories that capture a Pittsburgh that is...