Matt Larsen

Cleveland Stories Matt Larsen

Essays, Poetry, and Photography from Cleveland's Mt. Pleasant Neighborhood

Cleveland Stories is a place-based writing program that connect neighbors to showcase and share the stories of their community.

Residents from Mt. Pleasant, a neighborhood on Cleveland's southeast side, came together to understand the rich and complex narrative of their neighborhood's history. Literary Cleveland created a workshop series utilizing vintage and contemporary photography to help writers tell the story of their community on their own terms.

In Cleveland Stories: Mt. Pleasant, Volume II, writers tell Cleveland memories through their eyes, sharing a vision of Cleveland then and now in the Ohio rust-belt community often left behind. For readers seeking to understand Cleveland history, this book of poems, essays, reflections, and images shows that a community is not created from bricks and asphalt, but from the lives of its residents, and the stories they craft.