Rooftop Reading

Top off your summer months with The Rooftop Music & Reading Series. Each end-of-the-month-event brings a dynamic trio of performers together for a collaborative program of poetry, prose and music.

https://www.porchlightliterary.org/event-details/rooftop-music-reading-series

The series is a great way to support PorchLight while experiencing some of Iowa’s most exciting artists.

Tickets include drinks, refreshments and gorgeous views!

We are delighted to open the series with the team behind the Iowa Review, editor and non-fiction writer Lynne Nugent; and managing editor and poet, Alicia Wright.

Our musician is non other than local favorite, and world-class musician, Deb Talan.

Performer Bios:

Deb Talan has been writing songs since she was 14 years old. She formed The Weepies with Steve Tannen, played shows all over North America, toured in a real tour bus! Had songs placed in loads of movies and tv shows. Presently, Deb tours the country with her guitar-playing friend Dan Padley, bringing her music to people who need it. Her songs are equal parts prayer, meditation, medicine. But, rather like the medicine in Mary Poppins: tasty, colorful, and full of the bittersweet joy of being fully alive.

Lynne Nugent is Editor of The Iowa Review. Her chapbook of essays on motherhood and domesticity, Nest, won the 2019 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award and was published by The Florida Review in 2020. Her writing has appeared in the North American Review, Brevity, the New York Times, Full Grown People, Mutha Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essay “The Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card” was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016, and her essay “My Grief Is a Student of the Humanities” was runner-up for Mid-American Review‘s Fineline prize. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing and a PhD in English from the University of Iowa. In 2020, she won the Jean Jew Award for Women’s Rights, presented by the UI’s Council on the Status of Women.

Originally from Rome, Georgia, Alicia Wright has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and from the University of Denver, where she is in her final year as a Ph.D. candidate in English & Literary Arts. She served as the 2020–2021 Denver Quarterly Editorial Fellow (Associate Editor), and is the editor of Annulet and publisher of Annulet Editions. She has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and she currently works as Managing Editor of The Iowa Review. For the University of Iowa Department of English, she teaches a course on Literary Editing and leads The Iowa Review’s undergraduate internship program. She also hosts the poetry reading series Normie Creep in the Sacred Grove.

Her debut full-length collection of poetry, You’re Called By the Same Sound, is forthcoming from Thirdhand Books, an imprint of Bull City Press, in August 2025. Poetry appears or is forthcoming in the Paris Review, Chicago Review, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, West Branch, and jubilat, among others. Essays and reviews appear in Full Stop, Los Angeles Review of Books, and on the Ploughshares blog. She has presented her research and scholarship at MLA and the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, and her essay, “Deepstep Come Shining’s Interlucidations” is forthcoming in Selves and Others: Essays on C.D. Wright (Under Discussion Series, University of Michigan Press). She is editing a cluster, “C.D. Wright in Context,” for Contemporaries at Post45 (June 2025).