12 Books, 12 Months

Equals '24

In 2024, Belt Publishing published twelve books:

Be Not Afraid of My Body by Darius Stewart
Cat and Bird by Kyoko Mori
The Minotaur at Calle Lanza by Zito Madu
Hannibal’s Invisibles by Faye Daunt
The Best of the Rust Belt edited by (me)
Midwest Shreds by Mandy Shurannah
Currents in the Electric City: A Scranton Anthology edited by Brain Fanelli & Joe Krauss
Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA by Patty Heyda
Chicago House Music by Marguerite Howard
An Alternative History of Cleveland by Jon Wlasiuk
Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue edited by Lee Gutkind and Leslie Rabinowski
Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room: A Philosophy Primer for an Anxious Age by Jonathan Foiles* (publishes today!)

Quite a year! It started with the press becoming an imprint of Arcadia Publishing, the deal having closed at the end of December. For the first few months, we were still distributed by PGW/Ingram, and in May we shipped thousands of books from Tennessee to South Carolina and began being sold and distributed by Arcadia.

Most of the books we published this year were acquired before the deal, and some were already in galley form when it closed. Only one—the creative nonfiction anthology—was acquired after we came under the Arcadia umbrella.

Three fit comfortably under the category of memoir: Darius Stewart’s essays about growing up gay and Black in the South, and living with HIV; Kyoto Mori’s rumination on her life through beloved animals, and Zito Madu’s surrealist wander around Venice (a nonfiction best of the year according to Washington Post!) (We also published a book of essays by Sonya Huber in 2023, which was just named a finalist in the PEN/Art of the Essay award).

Three are anthologies: Belt’s 10 year compilation, the 30 year compilation from Pittsburgh’s Creative Nonfiction Foundation, and a collection of writing about life in Scranton, PA.

The rest include an atlas of Ferguson, an enthnography of skate parks, a history of Cleveland, a study of “real life Jims” who lived in Hannibal, and, publishing today, a book on treating anxiety by reading philosophy.

Of course, we are halfway through 2025 in our minds here at Belt as we ready to send our forthcoming titles to the printer: a (starred!) biography of Amelia Bloomer, a novel about tarot, comics, and the internet (delightfully described as “dark academia” in Netgalley reviews) a book of Pittsburgh maps, a thriller written by a Sociology professor, a rhubarb cookbook, Great Lakes maps, and the newest entry in our Revivals series, an early Dawn Powell novel set in Ohio.

All of the covers revealed in the clicks above were designed by David Wilson (as are the two tarot decks he has created for Belt, Great Lakes and Rust Belt Arcana, both now back in stock—and currently 50% off). Many of our recent and forthcoming titles have been edited by Phoebe Mogharei. I am extraordinarily grateful to have been able to continue collaborating with these two through a year of great changes. I am also exceedingly fortunate to work with so many fabulous authors, most of whom understand that to publish with Belt is to make a certain choice: they won’t receive huge, financially irrational advances corporate presses might offer if they decide to work with us, but they will be paid, not only in royalties but also by becoming part of a larger project (you can find many of them on Bluesky with a Starter Pack that Jon Wynn, one of our authors, put together. Oh, and Belt finally showed up on Bluesky too; give us a follow). I am lucky to be able to continue that project with the gang at Arcadia, who have been unflaggingly supportive, even of the idiosyncratic, hard-to-categorize books Belt loves to bring to readers, and which, I hope, offer a hedge against an increasingly homogenous publishing culture.

And that’s ultimately what defines Belt, I guess, that hedge. We like to publish books that might be otherwise overlooked, but not, as most assume that terms refers, due the identity of the author. It might be because it is set in a a Rust Belt city, a place others in publishing might consider having too thin in readership to be worthy, or because it centers an intellectual life, as with Minotaur at Calle Lanza, or takes an expansive, maximalist approach, one not currently found in most new releases, to literary fiction, and from a self-published as opposed to agented direction, as with the forthcoming Major Arcana. It’s hard to quickly sum up what binds all these books together, but the idea, at least, is to find the gaps, not replicate what others are publishing, so to offer alternatives and fill in holes, as well as strive to create a community amongst those who value and understand our approach. And that’s my final bit of gratitude at this the end of Belt’s long tenth year: to its readers, who also understand what this press is trying to do, figure out how to find us, and, when merited, extol our efforts and products. It’s what keeps me going, to discover there are people out there who I do not know, but who know and appreciate the press. Thanks.

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I’m offering my book proposal course in January if you or someone you know might be interested.