In 1969, the polluted Cuyahoga River burned, attracting negative national media attention. Then, only three fish species were found to be living in those contaminated waters. Now, in 2026, 77 fish species are thriving. Otter, beaver, and blue heron have also returned to the river’s banks. And people, too, are benefiting from the cleaner waters, enjoying water sports like canoeing, kayaking, and paddling.

It’s far too easy to allow the national media and disparaging fans to undermine Clevelanders’ views of their professional sports teams. While the Browns, Guardians, and Cavaliers have certainly caused more than their fair share of frustration and heartbreak, there are countless moments of glory in the fertile athletic history of Northeast Ohio that receive little notice east of Shaker Heights or west of Rocky River. Jonathan Knight’s Classic Cleveland Series sets out to combat this trend, bundling together the most memorable moments of Cleveland’s beloved athletic clubs. In three separate publications, Knight ranks the fifty greatest games in each franchise with entertaining accounts of each contest, properly placing them in the broad landscape of civic history. This updated edition covers the team’s name change and more recent memorable games.

The Conscience of a City and a Nation is the first comprehensive biography of Paul Block Jr., son of a publishing giant who owned newspapers across the United States. Block was passionate about studying chemistry, which he studied at Columbia and Yale. However, following his father’s death, he stepped in to help run papers the Blocks owned in Pittsburgh and Toledo. Eventually, Block and his family relocated to Toledo, one of Ohio’s up-and-coming cities.

Set against the backdrop of rural Ohio, Just Some Girl lyrically unpacks what it means to become a woman. While the author is initially nurtured by loving parents and strong sibling bonds, adolescence finds Schwanke lacking a sense of identity and feeling deeply insecure, like so many other teenage girls. To cope, she simultaneously reaches toward—and eventually fights against—disordered eating, alcohol abuse, painful relationships with men, and self-sabotage.

Using forms as diverse as journal entries, cell phone texts, children’s picture books, and erasure poems, LeMay wrestles with questions of illness, isolation, identity, grief, family, and love because, like so many us, he’s had to live them. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2017 when his first child was a little over a year old. He learned during the worst month of the COVID-19 pandemic that his 80-year-old father, unable to breathe, had been admitted to the emergency room in the middle of the night. Would he live? And if not? In these richly varied essays, LeMay helps us make our way, personally and collectively, through experiences that may be our last, all the while honoring those “firsts”—the first cry, the first word, the first day of school.

In the Ohio counties of the Allegheny Plateau, 19th-century barns hewn from old-growth wood rest near remnant forests, reminders of the state’s deep agricultural roots and rich ecological past. Through 14 linked, meditative essays, Deborah Fleming, author of the award-winning Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape, persuasively and passionately argues for protecting these vestiges of the region’s natural and rural history.

Somewhere west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River, the Midwest begins. Just where exactly, and how, and why are the questions explored in Where East Meets (Mid)West. Bringing together a range of perspectives, the volume argues that while cultural boundaries remain difficult to define, Ohio has been central to regional transitions throughout history. To Native Americans, Ohio was the meeting place of two major drainage basins: the Ohio River and the Great Lakes Basin, which resulted in large amounts of trade activity, cultural exchange, and conflict. During America’s westward expansion, Ohio was an essential pathway, the first of the new Northwest territories to gain statehood, and a battleground over the issue of enslavement. 

From the time James was a high school sophomore, former Cleveland Plain Dealer sports columnist Bill Livingston covered every step of his journey from the teenager who flouted high school league rules to a basketball icon and activist, one who even founded a school in his hometown.

LeBron James has been a polarizing yet beloved figure for sports fans around the world, possibly nowhere more so than in northeast Ohio, where he grew up. He began his basketball career hailed as “the chosen one,” a beacon of hope for a Cleveland team that had never won an NBA championship. He was then denounced for “the Decision” to leave and pursue his trophy dreams with the Miami Heat. The prodigal son subsequently returned to the Cavaliers, fulfilling “the Promise” to bring ultimate victory to Cleveland in 2016.

An anthology celebrating the biodiversity and staggering beauty of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Light Enters the Grove collects 42 poems, each of which reflects its author’s unique connection to a living organism found within the park—ranging from white-tailed deer to brown bats and from Japanese honeysuckle to bloodroot. Additionally, each poem is paired with an artistic depiction of the poem’s subject that reinforces the rich relationship between artists and the natural world.

John Vacha is the first to write a comprehensive, in-depth account of Playhouse Square’s history, beginning with the Square’s 1921 opening and describing how the COVID-19 pandemic once again left its theaters temporarily empty before their triumphant reopenings in 2022. Richly illustrated and featuring interviews with the central figures involved in saving the Square, Playhouse Square and the Cleveland Renaissance is a powerful story that will appeal to theater history buffs and preservationists alike—reminding readers of the significant role the performing arts serve in shaping a city’s culture.