Erin Keane is a critic, poet, essayist, and journalist. She’s the author of three collections of poetry, and editor of The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing). Her writing has appeared in many publications and anthologies, and in 2018, she coproduced and cohosted the limited audio series These Miracles Work: A Hold Steady Podcast. She is editor in chief at Salon, where she has worked since 2014, and teaches in the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.
Recommended Titles
My formal introduction to Belt came through Elizabeth Catte's urgent and tightly argued What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia — a much-needed corrective to the national conversation dominated at the time by a certain memoirist's "elegy" for the region and parachute journalism laser-focused on Republican Voters Who Hang Out In Diners All Morning. Later I fell in love with Matt Stansberry's reverent and mournful essays about the natural world around him as classic tarot archetypes in Rust Belt Arcana (the accompanying cards, featuring David Wilson's illustrations, became my first tarot deck) and Raechel Anne Jolie's tender memoir of her midwest working-class '90s alternative adolescence, Rust Belt Femme.
By Erin Keane: