I have a book coming out!

this week in author promotion

In July Belt is publishing a book I edited, Best of the Rust Belt. The tagline: “the best personal essays from a contested region.”

The book is a selection of a few dozen essays, mainly from Belt’s City Anthology series, that discuss life in a place that many call the Rust Belt (and others chafe at that name, preferring “Great Lakes Region” or “Midwest” or “Heartland” or “Postindustrial Midwest” or some such. It features some writers you may have heard of— Connie Schultz, Brian Broome, Kathleen’s Substack , Aaron Foley, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter, Sophie Benoit—and many equally strong but less recognized writers.

Anna Clark wrote the introduction, and it’s pretty moving, tbh.

“Centering more complex, more diverse stories—which is to say, truer stories—will get us to a better place. That goes for media coverage writ large as well as our individual habits of taking in news. It is more interesting, and more fun, even, to turn our attention to those who take the fullness of our voices as a given, and, accordingly, are building an infr…