When Anne Trubek published “Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology” in 2012, it was just meant to be a one-off project.

Instead, the anthology, dubbed an “inside-out snapshot” of the city “written by those who actually live and work there,” ended up launching Belt Publishing (beltpublishing.com) and Belt Magazine (beltmag.com), and the former Oberlin College associate professor of English has become entrenched in the world of Rust Belt literature. Last year, she moved to Pittsburgh.

“There was definitely an audience waiting for it,” says Trubek. “We were mainly supported in the beginning by people who don’t necessarily consider themselves as readers but who felt very connected to the city and wanted to see the city reflected back to them for good and ill.

“And you also had, like, Pittsburgh,” she continues. “Cleveland had been de-populating for decades. So you had a huge contingent of people who lived in the Sun Belt or in Florida or anywhere else who were from Cleveland. And it was very important to them to keep that connection and there just wasn’t enough going on in publishing to slake that thirst.”

Belt takes its name from that sometimes pejorative, sometimes badge of honor colloquialism “the Rust Belt,” which refers to parts of the northeastern and midwestern United States that were once booming areas of industry. The closing of the steel mills in and around Western Pennsylvania turned Pittsburgh into a large notch in that particular belt.

In 2015, Belt Magazine became its own nonprofit entity. Pittsburgher Ed Simon, whose recent book “An Alternative History of Pittsburgh” was published by Belt Publishing in 2021, was named editor-in-chief of Belt Magazine last year.

“There is no publication quite like Belt in terms of the geographic area which we cover, a massive region stretching from Western Pennsylvania to Minnesota, and that focuses on such a wide variety of articles from investigative reporting to creative nonfiction, photo-essays to poetry,” Simon said in an email.

“Most importantly, Belt eschews the stereotypes about the region that often come from national media.”

“Generalizations about the region’s population are now as popular as simply ignoring the Rust Belt was just a few years ago. Most are wrong,” Trubek has written.

Belt has always had an interest in presenting the knotty mosaic that is Pittsburgh. Belt Magazine has recently featured a personal remembrance of Susan Hicks, who taught at the University of Pittsburgh and was tragically killed in 2015 while riding her bike on Forbes Avenue in Oakland; an interview with Jake Oresick, whose late father, Peter, created “The Pittsburgh Novel” project, which attempts to list every single work of fiction that takes place in Western Pennsylvania; and an insider’s look at local journalism and the current strike by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writers.

Trubek succinctly explained the purpose of Belt in her introduction to “Voices from the Rust Belt,” an anthology of pieces from the press and the magazine put out by Picador, a New York publishing house, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. She wrote that it is “central to the mission of Belt Publishing … to create a much-needed space for the deep, various, complex, sad, wonderful, and pressing stories of the Rust Belt.”

The latest book from Belt Publishing is Ben Gwin’s “Team Building: A Memoir about Family and the Fight for Workers’ Rights;” Gwin was instrumental in organizing the contract workers in Google’s Pittsburgh offices in 2019. It joins two anthologies of writing about the city as well as a book about The Whiskey Rebellion and Ed Simon’s history. Next year will see the release of “Pittsburgh in 50 Maps.”

“[T]here is power in simply bearing witness. To learn about individual lives and specific places. To appreciate the writers’ abilities to render experience. And to resist the urge to make of this place a static, incomplete, cliché, a talking point, or a polling data set,” wrote Trubek.

Says Simon, “I always joke that we aspire to be The New Yorker of the Rust Belt, but I think that there’s some truth to that.”