Langston Hughes’ Radical Ohio Youth
To Hughes, America has never achieved its potential. Never reached the supposed promises enumerated in the nation’s founding documents.
Charting the Pittsburgh Novel with Jake Oresick
"I do appreciate titles that use the terrain instead of making their characters sit inside. I also enjoy titles that reveal the parts of our region that outsiders are unlikely to see, like Homewood, Butler, or old school, residential Oakland. Yinzers don't gaze down from Grandview Avenue all day like the movies would have you believe."
Megan Giddings Reimagines the Rust Belt
Reimagining the Rust Belt in Megan Giddings' "The Woman Could Fly."
James Purdy’s Outrages Against the Establishment
Purdy’s harshest words were consistently aimed at the literary apparatus that he felt was inherently unable to appreciate his formally deliberate but thematically audacious fiction.
Ohio in Toni Morrison’s Words
As much as Ohioans like me and others want to claim Morrison, her words belong to the world.
Rushdie and Free Speech, from Tehran to Pittsburgh
Literature isn’t just under attack in Iran, China, or El Salvador, however.
My American Windows
"I didn’t know it then, but I needed those windows...that wall of blue between my heart and the world."
Sometimes it S n o w s in A p r i l
"The snow f e l l like a miffed god took bites of cumulus clouds—spat them down / from heaven, o n t o my Midwest."
On Hope, History, and Storytelling in Flint
Kelsey Ronan’s 'Chevy in the Hole' reimagines the city some of us never knew.
Welcome to ReCreation Land
Strip-mining destroyed the landscape of central Ohio--and the lungs of many workers. What will it take to build a healthier future?
Treaty of Mendota
A poem of erasure.
Faith in Movement
Andy Warhol, the Rust Belt, and me.