Red State Blues

by Martha Bayne

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Dana Aritonovich is a lifelong left-winger (except for a brief lapse in judgment in sixth grade) who relishes every opportunity to prove right-wingers wrong. The death of her Trump-loving uncle weeks after the inauguration and the health scares of several other Republican relatives later that year revealed an unpleasant reality about her own judgmental stubbornness when it comes to politics. Dana wants to believe that everyone is multi-dimensional, but that’s getting increasingly difficult as the years go by and people become more invested in their own backyards than in the community as a whole. She studied political science, holds degrees in communications and American history, and is currently pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction. The blog What I Like I Sounds (https://whatilikeissounds.wordpress.com) is dedicated to exploring her entire music collection and how each piece has influenced her.

  Sydney Boles is an investigative reporter covering immigration detention and the criminal justice system in the Midwest. She is pursuing an MSJ from Medill School of Journalism.

  Bridget Callahan is a writer and comedian from Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and the 2018 Best Small Fictions. Her daily coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention street scene can be found at The Tusk, an online literary humor magazine where she serves as fiction editor. She is actively recruiting a secret dog army.

  Phil Christman teaches first-year writing at the University of Michigan and is the editor of the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Hedgehog Review, Commonweal, The American Scholar, The Christian Century, Books & Culture, and other publications.

  John Counts has published fiction and essays in the Chicago Tribune’s “Printers Row Journal,” the Chicago Reader, Joyland, Midwestern Gothic, and Belt’s A Detroit Anthology. He works as an investigative reporter for The Ann Arbor News and MLive Media Group. He is also an editor at the Great Lakes Review literary journal, where he conceived and edits the Narrative Map essay project.

  Chris Drabick is a former rock music journalist whose fiction has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, After the Pause and Great Lakes Review, and non-fiction in BULL and Stoneboat. He was the recipient of a 2012 Juniper Summer Fellowship, as well as winner of the Marion Smith Short Story Prize. He teaches English at the University of Akron in Ohio, where he lives with his wife, their two sons and too many vinyl LPs.

  Dan Gilman currently serves on the Pittsburgh City Council representing the 8th District, including the neighborhoods of Oakland, Point Breeze, Shadyside and Squirrel Hill. During his first term, Councilman Gilman has focused on creating a more accountable city government, embracing Pittsburgh’s technological renaissance in order to improve City services, and making Pittsburgh a more family-friendly and progressive city. Gilman has received many awards and accolades for his hard work, including recognition by The New DEAL, a national network committed to highlighting pragmatic progressives with innovative ideas at the state and local level, and nomination as one of Pittsburgh’s “40 Under 40” by Pittsburgh Magazine and Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project, as well as one of Pittsburgh’s “50 Finest” by Whirl Magazine. Councilman Gilman graduated from Pittsburgh’s Shady Side Academy, and then with honors from Carnegie Mellon University with a degree in Ethics, History, and Public Policy.

  Vince Guerrieri is a journalist and author in the Cleveland area. He attended college at Bowling Green State University, and was a newspaper editor in Northwest Ohio for eight years.

  Justin Kern is a writer and a nonprofit marketing human who lives in Milwaukee with his wife and cats. A former daily news reporter, his fiction and nonfiction words have run in Utne Reader, Great Lakes Review, Forth, Buffalo Spree, Milwaukee Record and Belt’s Buffalo anthology. He’s a card-carrying member of four of Dunkirk’s finer social clubs. His book, “Conniving for Nothing,” will be out eventually.

  Trent Kay Maverick is a professor of communications at John Carroll University and manages WJCU 88.7 FM, John Carroll’s college radio station. Before entering academia, Trent tried really hard to become fluent in Hawaiian, dragged an iffy number of acquaintances to Rocky Horror, and spent a year in Japan teaching English and eating all the food.

  Sarah Kendzior is a writer who lives in St. Louis. She covers U.S. and international politics for a number of publications, including the Globe and Mail, De Correpondent, NBC News and Fast Company. She has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St Louis, where she researched authoritarian states in Central Asia. Her best-selling essay collection, The View From Flyover Country, will be available in an updated print release in April 2018.

  Amanda Lewan is an entrepreneur and writer living in Detroit. Her work has been been recognized and published in NPR, The Nation, Journal of Americana and more. She is currently at work on her first novel. Visit her website at www.amandalewan.com for more.

  Rowan Lynam is a journalist covering environmental racism and immigration detention in the Midwest. They are pursuing an MSJ from Medill School of Journalism.

  Allison Lynn is the author of the novels The Exiles (Little A/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Now You See It (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster), as well as articles, essays, and book reviews for publications that include The New York Times Book Review, People magazine, and Post Road. She lives in Indianapolis with her husband and son.

  Annie Maroon is a writer from western Pennsylvania. She previously worked as a reporter for MassLive, and is now a freelance writer and photographer in the Boston area. Her work is online at anniemaroon.com.

  Greggor Mattson, a native of small-town Washington, is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oberlin College, where he directs the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. He is the author of a book on prostitution regulation, other essays for Belt, and is working on a book about gay bars.

  Edward McClelland is the author of Folktales and Legends of the Middle West, How to Speak Midwestern, Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland, and The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Salon, Slate, and the Nation.

  Samantha Phillips is a city reporter for the Youngstown Vindicator, covering crime, administration and education, and writing up some feel-good features. She loves being a storyteller for a living. She graduated from Youngstown State University in May 2017 with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication. When Samantha is not writing, she is spending time with loved ones, playing with her pitbull, volunteering, reading, obsessing over Black Mirror, or enjoying the outdoors.

  Angela Anagnost Repke lives with her family of four in Michigan. Her degrees in English and counseling suddenly mean more to her since becoming a stay-at-home-mom to help her mother in her triumphant battle against cancer. She turns to writing to help in both her daily blunders and rediscovering herself again outside of being a mother. Angela is a contributor at PopSugar and has been published in Good Morning America, ABC News, Scary Mommy, MSN Lifestyle, Mothers Always Write, and more. She is at work on Mothers Lie, a cross-generational memoir.

  Mark V. Reynolds is a Chicago-based writer who reflects upon the intersection of history, race and culture for Popmatters.com and other publications. He received first-place honors from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists in 2004 for media criticism, in the magazine Urban Dialect. He is a native of Cleveland, OH, and carries love for the Browns, Cavaliers, Indians and Stadium Mustard wherever he goes. In 2016-17, he served as Director of Marketing & Communications at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, his alma mater.

  Tara Rose is an essayist, television critic, and daughter of the Rust Belt who now lives in Winston-Salem, NC.

  Bill Savage teaches Chicago literature, history, and culture at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library of Chicago. He has published book reviews,
op-ed essays, and various polemics, jeremiads, and diatribes in the Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, the Chicago Reader, and other publications with “Chicago” in their masthead. He is currently at work on a book entitled “The City Logical,” about reading Chicago’s history through quirks in its grid of street names and addresses. He is a lifelong resident of Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.

  Ed Simon is the author of America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion and The Anthology of Babel. A frequent contributor at several different sites, including The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and Aeon among others, he holds a PhD in Renaissance and early American literature from Lehigh University. He can be followed on Twitter @WithEdSimon, or on his Facebook author’s page.

  Tory Sparks graduated from Oberlin College in 2017 with Highest Honors in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, specializing in studies of space, queer organizing, and generational politics. She served as the research assistant for the Who Needs Gay Bars? project by Professor Greggor Mattson in Summer of 2017, interviewing owners and patrons at rural, isolated gay bars across the American south and Midwest. She currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her cat, where she is the Washtenaw County Community Outreach Educator for Planned Parenthood. When she’s not teaching sex ed or working with high school peer educators, she enjoys bar trivia, road trips, and feminist rants.

  Lori Tucker-Sullivan is a freelance writer, whose poems, essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in various magazines and journals, including Now & Then: The Magazine of Appalachia, Passages North, The Sun, About the Girl, The Cancer Poetry Project, Midwestern Gothic, and others. Her essay, “Detroit, 2015” about her decision to return to Detroit after the death of her husband, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was listed as a Notable Essay of 2015 in Best American Essays, 2016. Her essay “Bused in and Bused Out: How Federal Mandates Changed Warrendale,” was included in Belt Publishing’s Detroit Neighborhood Guidebook in 2017. She is the author of the blog A Widow’s Apprenticeship. She holds an MFA from Spalding University with a focus in Creative Nonfiction and is working on a memoir about how friendships with the widows of 1970s rock stars helped her grief journey. She lives in Detroit.

  Christopher Vondracek appears as the poet Rattlesnake on South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s “Rock Garden Tour.” He is a journeyman English adjunct instructor and writes frequently on Lawrence Welk.

  Wendy Welch directs the Graduate Medical Education Consortium of Southwest Virginia, working at the intersection of health and economic development. With her husband Jack Beck (presenter of “Celtic Clanjamphry” for NPR) she runs a shop that is the subject of her 2012 memoir Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap. Editor of the volume Public Health in Appalachia, her most recent book is Fall or Fly, telling the story of foster care in Coalfields Appalachia. And she is ringmaster of the all-volunteer cat rescue APPALACHIAN FELINE FRIENDS. She sleeps between these things. Find her online at wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com.