A dazzling portrait of a Midwestern city whose relationships among socio-economics, religion, civil rights, and class are consistently complex. A part of Belt’s City Anthology Series.

St. Louis is a fragmented place. It’s physically dissected by rivers, highways, walls, and fences, but it’s also a place where one’s race, class, religion, and zip code may as well be cards in a rigged poker game, where the winners’ prize is the ability to ignore the fact that the losers have drastically shorter life expectancies. But it can also be a city of warmth, love, and beauty especially in its contrasts.

Edited by Ryan Schuessler (Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America), the collection features nearly 70 essays penned by St. Louis writers, journalists, clerics, poets, and activists including Aisha Sultan, Galen Gritts, Vivian Gibson, Maja Sadikovic, Nartana Premachandra, Sophia Benoit, Robert Langellier, Samuel Autman, Umar Lee, and more. Here you’ll learn about:

• The rent strike of 1969

• Religious life in Pruitt-Igoe public housing

• Protest art in Ferguson

• Segregation in the Vandeventer neighborhood

• A church closing in Kinloch.

The St. Louis Anthology dares to confront the city’s nostalgia and its traumas, celebrating those who have faced both who live complex lives in this city against a backdrop of its red brick, muddy rivers, and sticky summer nights when the symphony of cicadas and jazz is almost loud enough to drown out the gunshots.

A perfect introduction to St. Louis for people who want to learn more about it and a great resource for those people from St. Louis who want to hear stories told by their own neighbors.