Rooftop Music and Reading Series

Join us on the deck of MarketHouse 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 gorgeous views, drinks and good company

Becca Klaver is a writer, teacher, editor, scholar, and collaboration conjurer. She is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), as well as several chapbooks. Her latest publications are Midwinter Constellation (Black Lawrence, 2022), a collaborative homage to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, and Greetings from Bowling Green (The Magnificent Field, 2022), a chapbook of postcard poems. Her scholarly writing appears in Humanities, College Literature, Jacket2, and elsewhere. As an editor, she co-founded Switchback Books, co-edited the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books), and created group projects such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants. Becca has taught poetry in many settings across the U.S., from elementary schools to MFA programs to community workshops. She lives in Iowa City, where she used to work for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and continues to organize All Fours Group Chat, a feminist conversation meetup.

Annelyse Gelman Annelyse Gelman’s most recent book, Vexations (University of Chicago Press, 2023), won the 2022 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Gelman is also the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014), and the experimental pop EP About Repulsion (Fonograf Editions, 2019), as well as the artist’s book POOL (Neck Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB Magazine, the PEN Poetry Series, The Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Gelman also founded and directs Midst, an app and digital publishing platform focused on capturing, saving, and sharing the writing process. Read Midst at midst.press/read.

Gelman’s language-based, trans-disciplinary projects are frequently ekphrastic and collaborative, using consumer-grade technologies and available materials to explore intimacy, vulnerability, and interdependence. Beyond publishing, her expanded poetics practice has resulted in a duet with Tavares Strachan’s neon sculpture at the Blanton Museum of Art, a reading with Deborah Butterfield’s sculptures at the Manetti Shrem Museum, and a performance for José Parlá’s Amistad America mural (Austin, TX), and many other projects. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Deutsch-Amerikanische Fulbright-Kommission, New Zealand Pacific Studio, Fondation Jan Michalski, Fondation Thalie, and elsewhere (a full CV is available upon request). She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers.

Cate Dicharry received her MFA in Creative Writing from University of California, Riverside and later served as the IWP’s Youth Programs Coordinator. She became director of the Writing and Humanities Program at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine in 2019, serving also as managing editor of The Examined Life Journal and director of The Examined Life Conference. She now returns to the IWP as Director. She is the author of the novel The Fine Art of Fucking Up, among other publications.

Audra Kerr Brown On Audra’s new collection hush hush hush: “With an uncanny gift for creating characters we feel we have always known, Audra Kerr Brown treats us to stories about grief and love that lay bare for us real worlds of suffering and joy. The stories in hush hush hush succeed precisely where her characters’ tenuous connections to the world fail. Inside these stunning little tales are pawned prosthetic legs, a frozen ghost-child mascot haunting a home for pregnant teenagers, a new family home where chairs stack themselves and walls bleed, and family terrorists of every variety. Sad, haunting, and often darkly funny, I couldn’t stop reading these disarmingly beautiful stories of how easy it is to lose what we love the most. They shimmer and glow with quirky brilliance.”

—Meg Pokrass, author of Spinning to Mars and Founding Editor of Best Microfiction