People & Personalities

The very best writing from one of America’s most groundbreaking literary magazines.

When Creative Nonfiction debuted in 1994, the literary genre it championed was largely the target of skepticism or downright ridicule. But at a time when few editors were interested in the personal essay, the magazine doggedly explored new ideas and fresh modes of expression, and over the next three decades, its contributors pioneered what would come to be known as the “fourth genre.”

The thirty-two essays collected here bring together some of the finest work Creative Nonfiction published over its seventy-eight issues. Read Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic’s boyhood remembrances of the bombing of Belgrade, Carolyn Forche’s haunting, lyric catalog of her daily life as she faced down a cancer diagnosis, and John Edgar Wideman’s meditation on the photo of a murdered boy his same age—Emmett Till—and how the image haunted him forever. Here, you'll find work by such luminaries as Adrienne Rich and John McPhee, but also essays from more contemporary voices like Brian Broome, Elizabeth Fortescue, and Anne McGrath.

With an introduction by Lee Gutkind, Creative Nonfiction’s founder and editor, this collection captures the evolution of a genre and the amazing work of the little magazine that helped make it all happen.

The best personal essays from a contested region, from Belt Publishing’s ten years as a press.

Many have an opinion on what the Rust Belt is. It’s the "blue wall," "Trump country," the "flyover states," or the “real America.” Or maybe, as our own president has said, it's a place that no longer exists called by a name that has long outlived its usefulness. But undeniably, there’s something that connects the region. Maybe the question isn’t what defines that connection, but who.

Over the past ten years, Belt Publishing has been putting out books that prioritize the voices of the many people who live here. We’ve collected our favorite writing from our dozens of anthologies, from Pittsburgh to Gary, Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee to Cleveland, and more, documenting growing up in segregated St. Louis and elucidating the coded Islamophobia of southern Michigan. Featuring LaToya Ruby Frazier, Connie Schultz, Brian Broome, Megan Stielstra, Vivian Gibson, Aaron Foley, Kathleen Rooney, Sarah Kendzior, Phil Christman, and more. 

Screw Capital of the World. Forest City. Home of the Rockford Peaches of A League of Their Own fame. Rockford, Illinois, has many identities, most oriented toward the past. These days, the fastener industry has mostly rusted away, the trees are less plentiful than they once were, and professional women’s baseball is no more. What defines Rockford today?

According to The Rockford Anthology, it’s the people. Those who grew up here, who came by choice or by circumstance, or who decided to leave. People who lost someone or found a voice or built community here.

In this installment of Belt’s City Anthology series, the people of Rockford represent themselves in essays, poetry, and photographs. Here, you’ll meet someone who found the space to start a business after leaving the crowd in Chicago. Academy Award–nominee Bing Liu takes you on a personal tour of his childhood houses and the ghosts that lurk there. A local attorney and activist shares how the city pushed back when ICE wanted to bring a detention center to Rockford. And you’ll learn why New York Times bestselling author Kimberla Lawson Roby, stand-up comedian Ashley Ray-Harris, and an introverted expat living in Taiwan always say they’re from Rockford . . . not Chicago. Whether through stories of growing up or chronicles of fights to make the city better, a sense of Rockford’s present—and future—starts to come into focus.

“As a man who long convinced himself that he lived on the edge of the world, here’s my wish for you: Embrace the awe. Allow yourself to feel alone. Then remember you are not.”

The thirty-three writers in this collection grapple with the vastness of the lakes—and the vastness of experience living alongside them. Gabriel Bump explores how his relationship with Lake Michigan changed after losing a friend. Kathleen Rooney explores the ghosts and faded glamour of one residential building on the water. The essays span Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Duluth, Ontario—and also the smaller places: Crane Creek wetlands, Michigan's Blue Water Area, Lake Superior's Apostle Islands, Bad River Band Ojibwe Reservation. Come dive for shipwrecks, harvest manoomin, and visit the disappearing ice caves. Witness the chickadees, smelt, and cattails, but also zebra mussels, factory runoff, and algae. Each writer’s relationship with the lakes is personal and unique, but that relationship to the water is also one shared by so many of us.

What does the future hold for the Midwest?

A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for the coming challenges of climate change. But it also sits at the epicenter of a massive economic collapse that many of its citizens are still struggling to overcome. The question of what the Midwest is (and what it will become) is nothing new. As Phil Christman writes in this idiosyncratic new book, ambiguity might be the region's defining characteristic. Taking a cue from Jefferson’s grid, the famous rectangular survey of the Old Northwest Territory that turned everything from Ohio to Wisconsin into square-mile lots, Christman breaks his exploration of Midwestern identity, past and present, into 36 brief, interconnected essays. The result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home.

Phil Christman is one of the best cultural critics working today. Or, as a reviewer of his previous book, Midwest Futures, put it, one of the most underappreciated writers of [his] generation.You may also know Phil from his columns in Commonweal and Plough, or his viral essay What Is It Like To Be A Man?, the latter adapted in his new book, How to Be Normal.

Christman's second book includes essays on How To Be White, How to Be Religious, How To Be Married, and more, in addition to new versions of the above. Find in it also brilliant analyses of middlebrow culture, bad movies, Mark Fisher, Christian fundamentalism, and more.

With exquisite attention to syntax and prose, the astoundingly well-read Christman pairs a deceptively breezy style with radical openness. In his witty, original hands, seemingly normal subjects are rendered exceptional, and exceptionally.

Whether failing to restrain herself from trying to find greater meaning in roadkill, or to convince her dad that psychedelic mushrooms will not save his marriage, or to believably perform enthusiasm for her teammates, Elizabeth Zaleski is trying hard and failing spectacularly, and thankfully, she takes us along for the ride.

Funny, intimate, and candid, The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure debuts an exciting new voice. From growing up in a quirky family in rural northeast Ohio and attending a Mennonite high school as a lapsed Catholic to struggling to get over a particularly well-endowed lover and suffering intestinal calamity while searching for closure, Zaleski’s stories are at once captivating in their singularity and recognizable in their truthfulness. Fans of Tim Kreider and Sloane Crosley will appreciate Zaleski’s levity and wit as she takes aim at such time-honored institutions as pet ownership and gives clear-eyed dispatches from the no man’s land that is an HPV diagnosis.

As Zaleski writes, “If you’ll bear with me, we’re going to get a bit technical. And then, I promise, it will all start to matter.” 

In Currents in the Electric City, an installment of Belt’s City Anthologies series,  the story of Scranton gets told by the people who know it best.

Scranton, PA,  is more than just the setting for The Office. It's a living city, one with a rich industrial and labor history, that also has a small-town feel. Who is considered “from Scranton” is fiercely guarded even as the city sees immigration from around the world. Neighborhood talk can reveal your family secrets before you even know them yourself, as Barbara J. Taylor writes. Pieces in this anthology talk about desires to leave, ties that bind, and decisions to stay, as well as impressions from newcomers to the Northeastern Pennsylvania hub. As coeditor Joe Kraus notes in his foreword, Scranton was once a prominent stop on the vaudeville circuit—vaudeville translating literally into “the voice of the city.” The chorus of voices that fill the poems and essays in this anthology tell a complicated story of the Electric city that many have heard of, but few know.

An anthology of essays and poetry offering 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 live in America. This rich anthology offers an inside look at the city through the eyes of both longtime residents and recent transplants. In over forty-five essays, you’ll hear stories about the city’s past, including the region’s legacy of violence against Native Americans and Sioux Falls’s status as a “divorce destination” in the late 1800s. But you’ll also discover the ways the city’s savvy planning and entrepreneurial gumption have helped it navigate twenty-first-century challenges.

You’ll read about:

·       the end of George McGovern’s presidential run at a Sioux Falls Holiday Inn

·       the vibrant Jewish and Syrian-Muslim communities that helped form the city

·       the first sit-down strike in American labor history

·       firsthand accounts of how South Sudanese refugees are shaping the city today

·       And more

Edited by Patrick Hicks and Jon K. Lauck, City of Hustle: A Sioux Falls Anthology gives an insider’s perspective on what’s really going on in so-called “flyover country,” and it shows why that name misses so much of the true richness that makes up life there every day.