Karen J. Weyant: “Born and raised in the Rust Belt, I know that rust runs through my veins. Rust coats my work, my studies, and my car. Even now, as an English professor in a small Rust Belt community college, I tell my students not to be ashamed of rust. It can make the world look at things in a different way.” (website)
Laszlo Slomovits: “Born in Budapest, Hungary, I left after the 1956 Revolution with my twin brother and Holocaust-surviving parents, lived in Israel for three years, then moved to Kingston, New York, at age eleven. I went to college at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, where as a senior, I met my wife. She was accepted to grad school at the University of Michigan, so we moved to Ann Arbor thinking we’d be here a year or two—and never left. Perhaps because of all my traveling as a child, and learning three languages early on, inner regions of memory and imagination have often been more important to me than outer locales and their dialects. I’ve thought often about the effect of living here on my writing; so many writers talk about the value and even necessity of a sense of place. But all I’ve arrived at after 44 years, is that something of the grounded, pragmatic nature of this region and its people has combined with my underlying sense of rootless everywhere-ness. Voices and subjects that attempt to weave the secretly symbolic with the down to earth are what I’m always looking for. Throughout these years, working as a folk musician with my twin brother, I have traveled throughout Michigan, nearby Rust Belt states, and many other regions of the U.S. and Canada. At some point I recognized Ann Arbor as a place I could call home, for which I feel very grateful.” (web)
Ed Ruzicka: “When, where I grew up, factories and foundries stood as the inveterate core of American industry, behemoth maws consuming hours, lives. Men, women did work by the back, muscle, hand. No one relied on anybody but themselves. I learned that by dad’s absence, by how mom darned socks. At twenty I went to work to find America, write America. I left. Leaving was part of it. I go back. Especially in the poems I go back. I hope like hell I’ve got sweat in these poems. And loss. Lust and bewilderment. An honest day, an honest word.” (website)
Christine Rhein: “I grew up in Detroit, and I’ve always lived in southeastern Michigan. When I began studying and writing poetry, in my mid-30s, I discovered the work of Philip Levine. I was inspired not only by his poems, but also by the circumstances of his early life. As a daughter of immigrants and as an automotive engineer, I suddenly saw, through Levine, that I might dare write poems.” (website)
Ken Meisel: “To grow up here was to grow up in glory and ruin. In the ’70s, this was a weirdly glorified place—you’ve got Motown, the autos, Jackie Wilson, this music legacy, jazz clubs, Miles, Ella Fitzgerald—there’s this glory, but it was also this post-apocalyptic ruin of burnt out buildings and heroin addicts in the streets. It was a horror, really. And so, even then, when I lived down there and was fumbling with writing mostly as a student, I was transfixed with that juxtaposition. How can it be this but also that?”
Cade Leebron: “I grew up in south central Pennsylvania, which is in the Rust Belt, and is also part of the region occasionally referred to as Pennsyltucky. Specifically, I grew up in Gettysburg, which is both a tourist town and a college town. These two ‘industries’ helped to keep Gettysburg a bit more afloat than the surrounding area, though the town still has a lot of issues with poverty (and a floundering public school system, and racism, and anti-Semitism, and misogyny, and a list that could continue on). Mostly when I tell people I grew up there, I say that there are more dead people than alive. I suppose this could be said of anywhere, though it tends to get a laugh in the context of Gettysburg ghost tours. Growing up, Gettysburg often felt like a trap (and sometimes it was a trap that I didn’t want to escape) and I think that both this sense of confinement and being surrounded constantly by death have influenced my poetry. Often when I build a poem, I’m replicating that feeling, I’m building a trap. And the speaker is stuck in there and has to somehow figure it out. Growing up in the Rust Belt also gave me a sense of awareness when writing of never wanting to make fun of people stuck in poverty, or stuck in tiny towns, or stuck in circumstance. It’s not that these communities shouldn’t be critiqued, just that having grown up where I did, I don’t think it helps to make rural people the butt of all our post-election think-piece jokes.” (website)
Nancy Krygowski: “I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, where I came to consciousness as the steel mills closed and the downtown emptied and boarded itself up. I moved to New England (because, I thought, that’s where poets come from). Then San Francisco (again, poets). But those places were too easily, too obviously, beautiful—blue skies and candy colored houses, little bakeries with happy hippy-haired workers. I missed having to search for beauty, missed, also, how emptiness breeds, needs creation. So I came back—to buildings that still hold the mills’ smoke, to potholes and aproned church ladies who sell pierogis during Lent. This sensibility—how to find the beautiful in the grit, in the destruction—guides my writing.” (website)