Rust Belt Magazine

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Membership - Belt Magazine Belt Magazine publishes the best writing, journalism, and photography by and for the Rust Belt and greater Midwest. And we can’t do any of it without supporters like you.

“A phrenological bust, an abandoned blast furnace, twin light-houses, a tree bedazzled in Spanish moss: each of the pictures – beguilingly mysterious as they were – gave every author an opportunity to consider what stories might lay just outside of the frame.”
A group of Pittsburgh writers recently convened in an historic space to share pieces created in response to the evocative photographs of Huck Beard. We’ll be sharing them this week, back from our hiatus, now publishing as Rust Belt Magazine.

October 2025 - Belt Magazine By Ed Simon On an autumnal evening in mid-September of 2025, Carnegie Mellon University creative writing professor and accomplished novelist Sharon Dilworth convened a reading which included herself and ten other authors at the historic Homestead Pump House in Munhall, Pennsylvania. Each of the gath...

A conversation between Bill Lychack and Sherrie Flick, in which the latter discusses the mystery of bears, the art of joy in writing and life, and her new collection of stories, “I Have Not Considered Consequences” (Autumn House Press, 2025)

https://beltmag.com/considering-consequences-with-sherrie-flick

Considering Consequences with Sherrie Flick A conversation with Sherrie Flick, in which the author talks the mystery of bears, the art of joy in writing and life, and her new collections of stories, "I Have Not Considered Consequences" (Autumn House Press, 2025)

“That’s how they mark the restroom doors here,
Hymns and Hers. When I was a kid this bar
was a funeral home. Prior that a foundry.”

Read “Hymns & Hers” and three other poems by Kristofer Collins.

Four Poems by Kris Collins Hymns & Hers That’s how they mark the restroom doors here, Hymns and Hers. When I was a kid this bar was a funeral home. Prior that a foundry. Frank J. Boyle cut the marble here and delivered the headstones to the lithe grass of new plots in Allegheny Cemetery not fifty steps from this