PorchLight: Rooftop Music & Reading Series

Join them on the deck of Market House in IC’s North Side for an evening of music, poetry, and prose. The Rooftop 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.

Matthew Neill Null is a recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Michener–Copernicus Society of America Award. His stories appear in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, PEN /O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Mystery Stories. A native of West Virginia, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’  Workshop and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as at the American Academy in Rome. His novel, Honey from the Lion (Lookout, 2015), was short listed for the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and his story collection, Allegheny Front (Sarabande, 2016), was named a finalist for Foreword’s INDIE collection of the year. He is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. 

His new novel, Floodgate, is forthcoming in August 2026 from Blair. 

Cory Hutchinson-Reuss (she/her) is a poet whose work has appeared in Timber, Slice, Zone 3, Josephine Quarterly, Crazyhorse (for the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize), the Missouri Review online, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Iowa and has taught in both academic and community settings. Originally from Arkansas, she currently lives in Iowa City, where she has participated in the Writers Workshop at Oakdale Prison, reads poetry for The Adroit Journal, and serves on the Advisory Council for Iowa City Poetry, a nonprofit group that works to make poetry events widely accessible to the local community. A collaborative chapbook of her poems and the visual art of Giselle Simón was published in 2022 as part of the PromptPress Gallery Series. On the elevator or down the aisles or in the kitchen, Cory is always on the brink of dancing.

Nicole Upchurch is an Associate Director of the Family Folk Machine. She is a singer/songwriter and clawhammer banjo player who performs regularly with Awful Purdies and The Feralings.

Margaret LeMay is the author of sample.spring, a poetry collection available from Finishing Line Press. Her work was a recent finalist for The Iowa Review Awards and has been shortlisted for the Four Way Books Levis Prize, the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, and the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Award. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Brink, the North American Review, The Cortland Review, The Iowa Review and elsewhere. Her work also can be dialed up at two U.S. locations of the Telepoem Booth and has served as title and movement titles for a piano quintet commissioned by the Library of Congress.