PorchLight: Rooftop Music & Reading for July
July 31 @ 7:00 pm
Join PorchLight on the deck of MarketHouse in IC’s North Side for an evening of music, poetry, and prose. The Rooftoop Music & Reading Series brings together some of Iowa’s most exciting artists for a one-of-a-kind collaborative program. Bring a buddy, date, or come alone. Stay for the lovely views, and good company. Purchase tickets for the event on the PorchLight website!
The July session features:
Lauren Haldeman is the author of Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry), Calenday, and The Eccentricity is Zero. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Tin House, The Colorado Review, Fence, Tupelo Quarterly, among others. A graphic novelist and poet, she’s received an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Scott Russell Morris is a writer and enthusiast. He is the author of Points of Tangency: Essays (Cornerstone Press, Sept 2024) and is the editor and creator of Magpie Zines, a zine about tarot, magpies, and found meaning. He is the Poet Laureate of Mt Vernon, IA, and an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College.
Deb Talan grew up in the small town of Pelham, Massachusetts. She later attended Brown University, where she was a member of the Chattertocks, Brown’s oldest all-female a cappella group, before moving to Oregon, where she was a member of Hummingfish, a Portland band, for six years. Talan’s recurring lyrical motifs include celestial objects, birds, nature, and various historical figures (e.g., Marc Chagall in “Painting By Chagall,” Amelia Earhart in “Thinking Amelia,” and Vincent van Gogh in “Vincent”). Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn inspired Talan to write “Tell Your Story Walking”. This song appears on the 2002 album Songs Inspired by Literature (Chapter One), a benefit of the organization Artists for Literacy. “Tell Your Story Walking” was the winner of Artists for Literacy’s 2002 songwriting contest. In addition to the Weepies’ albums, (Steve Tannen is the other half of the duo), Talan and Tannen collaborated with singer/actress Mandy Moore on her 2007 album Wild Hope. Together, they wrote and recorded five songs with Mandy — the single “Extraordinary,” the title track “Wild Hope,” “All Good Things,” “Few Days Down” and “Looking Forward to Looking Back.”[1] “Forgiven” played over the closing credits of the 2001 film Lovely & Amazing.
Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the story collections Ask Me About the Money and We Could’ve Been Happy Here. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, his work has received support from the Anderson Center, Iowa Arts Council, and Springboard for the Arts. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, december magazine, Gettysburg Review, New Stories from the Midwest, North American Review, Redivider, Terrain, and elsewhere. He’s a founding editor of Cutleaf and teaches at Northeast Iowa Community College.
