“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.

“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.”

“This anthology of prose, poetry, and essays is written by . . . [a] wide ethnic array of voices that truly shows the facets of Detroit life.” —Ebony Magazine
 
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’—with the ratcheted-up language that comes with it—and 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.
 
“Offers from-the-heart and on-the-ground views of life in America’s Motor City.” —The Boston Globe
 
“A thrilling success. It gives voice to people who now live or once lived in this fascinating, tortured place, the survivors, good people who know what pain is, people who understand that the city exerts an undying pull on them.” —The Millions

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.

“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.