The Best of Belt Magazine 2021
Our new anthology of regional writing, available exclusively to Belt members.
Our new anthology of regional writing, available exclusively to Belt members.
Chicago is the most dangerous city in the country for birds. Meet the people who want to change that.
A proposed Amtrak route would restore passenger service between Chicago, Fort Wayne, Columbus, and Pittsburgh. Can new federal investment make it happen?
Stories on climate change, industrial legacies, and planning for a just future.
Eleven pieces on identity, community, exploitation, and resilience in Appalachia.
Trump, militias, and the long history of voter intimidation and violence in the Midwest.
Stories on the long history of racism and police violence in the Midwest—and what to do about it.
How one Indiana community rejected Trumpism.
"The twentieth century in America brought dramatic changes to the farm...one of which was the abstraction of my family and me from our roots on the land."
The U.S. poet laureate on her new edited collection and how literature can mend a fractured civic culture.
The Maumee River does not begin.
One Saturday in June, I drove around the southern edge of Lake Michigan with Thomas Frank, an activist from East Chicago, Indiana, looking for oil. We had met a few weeks previous, at a conference put on by the Freshwater Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Frank was on a panel about oil pipelines.