“Art is [still] a Weapon”: A Brief History of the Protest Novel
“Every time he saw another building in Pittsburgh being spray washed to remove the decades of soot… he would think of their legacies being slowly erased.”
Two Poems by Joseph Goosey
Two poems by Joseph Goosey.
Reweaving the Stories of Our Public Art
How does public art limit (or extend) what we can know about the past, present, or future? How can art support us in telling a new story, a shared story about who we are?
Kent State of Mind
A poem by Caleb Gill.
From Pretoria to Peoria
There’s a neologism that I’d propose for the often-radical international activism that comes from non-coastal college towns that are too often easily ignored – midwestern cosmopolitanism.
A History of the Pride Flag in My Doorway
Notes on living and moving as an out queer person in the Rust Belt.
Belt’s Top Stories of 2020
Eleven pieces our readers kept coming back to.
Cleveland Doesn’t Need Your Love—It Needs Your Fire
Commentary: A goodbye letter to the city.
Protest and Power
Scenes from a moment of reckoning.
Coming Into a Black Woman’s Anger
On Audre Lorde and Minnesota Nice.
Remembering the Kent State Shootings, Fifty Years Later
Survivor Chic Canfora reflects on life then and now.
Protesting ICE Immigration Raids in Chicago
Thousands gathered in Chicago's Daley Plaza to protest migrant imprisonment and planned ICE raids in major U.S. cities.