Bringing emerging and established writers, artists, and photographer together, this collection explores what has happened in Akron, Ohio over the years and what may be happening in the future. Between 1910 and 1920, Akron was the fastest growing city in the United States, tripling in size and exploding from a population of 69,000 to 208,000. Its period of rapid growth coincided with the expansion of the rubber and tire industry, which in turn corresponded with that of the automobile industry. But since the mid-1970s, industry has abandoned Akron, and the city has lost 31% of its population. Once opulent neighborhoods are now swaths of abandoned homes; the factories that made Akron the Rubber Capital of the World lie dormant. Providing readers with diverse group experiences, this book is grounded with a strong sense of place through the unique voices, original points of view, and stories of city life in Akron.

A part of Belt's City Anthology Series, this collection explores Akron, Ohio's past and what may happen there in the future. A portrait of the "city's rich, mysterious, odd-leaning inner life." Between 1910

Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town tells the story of growing up in the rubber community of Firestone Park in Akron, Ohio"the former Rubber Capital of the World. The book begins with the rededication of the bronze Harvey Firestone statue on August 3, 2000, at the Centennial celebration for the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. The statue"perched high on a hill at the entrance to Firestone Park, the residential community Harvey built for his workers in 1915"was sacred to the author, Joyce Coyne Dyer, and her father, Tom Coyne, during the fifties, a time when the Coynes worshipped the company and thought themselves members of the Firestone family.

The Mayor of Goosetown is a story about recovering times in our lives that have nearly vanished. We realize we can't remember everything about our past. We search for signs and symbols to jar our recollections. Joyce Dyer weaves her story around the shadows that remain of her first five years. Her uncle, the self-proclaimed mayor of Goosetown, accompanies her as they travel to unearth lost years. She takes the reader on an erratic and unpredictable process. Is the excursion a wild goose chase or can she really find home?

Award-winning author and journalist David Giffels explores the meaning of identity and place, hamburgers, hard work, and basketball in this collection of wry, irreverent essays reflecting on the many aspects of Midwestern culture and life from an insider’s perspective. In The Hard Way on Purpose, David Giffels takes us on an insider’s journey through the wreckage and resurgence of America’s Rust Belt. A native who never knew the good times, yet never abandoned his hometown of Akron, Giffels plumbs the touchstones and idiosyncrasies of a region where industry has fallen, bowling is a legitimate profession, bizarre weather is the norm, rock ’n’ roll is desperate, thrift store culture thrives, and sports is heartbreak. Intelligent, humorous, and warm, Giffels’s linked essays are about coming of age in the Midwest and about the stubborn, optimistic, and resourceful people who prevail there.

Rockman's poems have been recognized with the Baskerville Publishers' Award, the New Mexico Discovery Award, the Southwest Writers Poetry Prize, and The MacGuffin National Poet Hunt. She teaches poetry at Santa Fe Community College, and in private workshops.

Here is a book that is truly quietly deeply subtle. It appears to operate along the lines of here is how one thing follows another; it appears to rely on anticipated cause and effect to spring us forth from one fraction of a split second's thought to the next. There are many and then actions in this book. What follows comes as a surprise sometimes even when it shouldn't. For instance, at one poem's conclusion it says: An archer shoots. That's what an archer does. And this is astonishing. And then it is almost heartbreaking and then one must do a double take and then there is poetry. --Dara Wier A few rare holdouts to the contrary, American culture is loud, unsubtle, insensitive, needy, exhausting, cheaply convenient, unreflective, and above all, distracted. What has been happening behind the scenes during all the years we haven't been paying attention? What world have we given ourselves and what have we given up in that shallow exchange? Such observations are deeply implied by the poems in Seth Abramson's Thievery. At the bottom of this book is the sense that we've been ripped off and don't even know it yet. That we have allowed it has left us stunted, morally and spiritually, with no greater sense of wonder than a Styrofoam cup. Abramson is not preaching, however: he is telling the melancholy, lonely truth.--Maurice Manning