Editing

From 2018-2022, I assigned and edited features, essays, and commentary at Belt Magazine, a digital publication by and for the Rust Belt and greater Midwest. Stories I edited have been recognized by the the Institute for Nonprofit News, the Detroit Society of Professional Journalists, the Cleveland Press Club, and the Pittsburgh Black Media Foundation, as well as The Best American Essays 2022.

Features – Politics & Environment
The Rubber Industry’s Toxic Legacy in Akron
East Chicago’s Failed Utopian Visions
#NoCopAcademy and the Movement to Defund the Police
Detroit Water Shutoffs and a Crisis of Public Health
What to Do with the Chicago River?
Smoke in the Valley: Inside the Petrochemical Buildout on the Ohio
The Young Patriots and the Fight for the Working Class in Uptown
Prison Gerrymandering and the Politics of Representation
The Undemocratic Making of Indianapolis
Losing Lordstown

Features – Arts & Culture
Give Your Money to Mary Lane
How the Kent State Shooting Changed American Music
Making Space for Virgil Cantini in Pittsburgh
“The King of the Hoboes”
Forty Years of ‘Blues Before Sunrise’
Bob Ross Was Here
Reviving Detroit’s Historic Blue Bird Inn
The Legend of Big Ole
House on the Rock at Sixty
Remembering WOXY and the Modern Rock 500

Essays
Hair and History in ‘Akron’s Harlem’
The Loiterers of Mt. Jewett
Home Again at the Flint South Side Reunion
The Girl in the Mall
Except for the Cancer I’m Fine
Black Lives and a River Road
The Real Walleye Capital of the World
Traveling While Black in Indiana
Akron’s Vietnam
The Summer We Went to the Moon

Commentary
Why Pittsburgh Needs the Paris Agreement
Life After the Derecho
The Keystone State is Ringing
An Elegy for John Prine
Ohio Has Always Had Confederate Apologists
What Indiana Dunes National Park and the Border Wall Have in Common
Power and Possibility in Dayton’s Oregon District
Toni Morrison and the Black Midwest
Squirrel Hill is a Special Place–And It’s Not by Accident
Cleveland After Serial

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