Why I Left Los Angeles For This
“But … why?” she asks me in equal parts disgust and curiosity. Her words linger between us, like a sour stench waiting to dissipate up into the air and away from where we stand, locked in unlikely confrontation.
Rust Belt, Rusted City: An Interview With Rochelle Hurt
Belt sat down with decorated poet Rochelle Hurt to talk about her recent collection of prose-poetry, The Rusted City, published by Buffalo-based White Pine Press earlier this year.
Love’s Anger: The Rust Belt Can Make Injustice Visible
Picture the toy gun, abandoned beneath a gazebo. Just some found object with no identifiable owner. Scan the sidewalk, and see if you can spot the loose cigarettes scattered in front of a Staten Island storefront.
Fritz Pollard: Football’s Unsung Trailblazer
Fritz Pollard stepped off a train in Akron, Ohio, on a Sunday morning in October 1919, and caught a taxicab downtown to the United Cigar Store.
Sports In The Land That Cleaves
When it came time for me to play football in eighth grade, I didn’t have any idea what position to play. I grew up dreaming of diamonds, not gridirons.
An Interview With Amy Jo Burns, Author of Cinderland
Amy Jo Burns is the author of Cinderland, a memoir about coming of age in a small town in Western Pennsylvania while carrying the burden of a lie.
“A Champion of the People”: Youngstown Says Goodbye to Jim Traficant
Jim Traficant hadn’t won an election in more than a decade. He hadn’t won a football game in more than 50 years. Since his release from prison in 2009, after serving seven years on federal corruption charges,
A Belt Q&A With Noah Vaughn
I met Noah Vaughn around 1991 at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, in figure-painting class. His artwork has always been about the urban environment — its transition, its transformation, its decay.
Boy Shot
For me, the details surfaced Sunday morning, over coffee, nearly eighteen hours after it happened: Twelve-year-old boy Tamir Rice shot dead by a Cleveland police officer at Cudell Recreation Center Saturday, November 22, 2014, at 3:30 in the afternoon.
Why Readers Care About Journalism, And Why The Cleveland Plain Dealer Should Care About Its Readers
I’m a news junkie. While my bandwidth for online news consumption exceeds that for print, I still receive two daily newspapers, three if you count the four days of the week that The Plain Dealer is home-delivered.
From Cleveland to Ferguson, With Love
I am watching Twitter and TV, where rage spills onto the streets of Missouri like gasoline. But my heart is not in Ferguson tonight.
Tamir Rice Shooting and Cleveland Police Violence
We are gathering writing that furthers the discussion of the shooting of Tamir Rice in Cleveland and related issues of [...]