Rooftop Reading Series

Our Rooftop Reading Series kicks off Friday June 28th. Join us on the lovely deck atop Market House for an evening interweaving local live music, poetry and prose from some of our areas most exciting artists. Bring a buddy or a date or come solo. Stay for a drink and the spectacular views. Our June event kicks off the series with poet Anna Morrison, prose writer Rachel Yoder and musician Deb Talan. We couldn't be more excited for this powerhouse trio to perform. 

Upcoming readers and performers will include Dereck Nnuro, Brian Johannesen, Lyz Lenz, Stephanie Catlett, Amy Margolis and Daneil Khalastchi. Single and season tickets are available!

Anna Morrison is a poet and screenwriter from Atlanta, Georgia with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of Long Exposure, winner of the 2022 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and her poetry and nonfiction have been published in Best American Poetry, The Adroit Journal, Brink, and Narrative, among many other journals. She also co-edits the literary journal Two Peach with poet Catherine Pond. Her writing and films deal with themes of motherhood & madness, familial grief, and mental health. She lives in Iowa City where she is a Lecturer in Screenwriting in the Cinematic Arts department at the University of Iowa.

Deb Talan has been writing songs since she was 14 years old. Granted, her style has changed a bit since writing the forever-unknown smash-hit “Through the Window” about feeling numb, like life was going on somewhere out there but not accessible to her (at 14. so jaded.) She played clarinet, wrote songs on piano, later taught herself to play guitar in college, got obsessed with Shawn Colvin, was a vegetarian for 4 years, ended that with a hotdog and a swim in lake Michigan, started a band in Portland, OR with her friend Mark, named it Hummingfish, wrote a lot of fun songs that people danced to ‘til they were all sweaty in that hipster/grungy/geeky Northwest kind of way, moved back to the east coast 6 years and a divorce later and began playing solo in Boston coffee houses (read: 4 different Starbucks that she also poured espresso at) opened shows for Catie Curtis (a songwriter hero of hers) met up with Steve Tannen and formed The Weepies, played shows all over the country and the world, toured in a real tourbus! moved to LA, got married to Steve, made 5 records and 3 amazing boy-children together with him, had songs placed in loads of movies and tv shows, moved to Iowa, got breast cancer, got chemotherapy and relied heavily on marijuana for pain and nausea relief(Legalize, for gods’ sakes, can we grow up as a country, please?) recovered from breast cancer, made a solo album, struggled with mental health issues (Childhood Incest Survivor, lucky to be alive, music has helped, and so have many blessed healers) and relationship issues for 6 years, got divorced from Steve. She has a lot she could say these days. She prefers to listen. But playing songs for people is a close second. Music heals. Songs can be prayers. Deb Talan is some lovely damn proof of that.

Rachel Yoder is the author of Nightbitch (2021), her debut novel. A film adaptation of her novel, written & directed by Marielle Heller and starring Amy Adams, will be released in 2024. She is an Assistant Professor of Screenwriting and Cinema Arts at the University of Iowa. Selected as an Indie Next Pick in August 2021, Nightbitch has gone on to be named a best book of the year by Esquire and Vulture and recognized as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and shortlist for the McKitterick Prize.

Her stories and essays have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, and The Sun. With Mark Polanzak, she is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process.