Rooftop Reading Series

Join us for the second installment of the Rooftop Reading Series  Friday July 26th. 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 July event features with poet Vi Khi Nao, prose writer Derek Nnuro and musician Stephanie Catlett. We couldn't be more excited for this powerhouse trio to perform. 

Vi Khi Nao is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, play, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her forthcoming novel, The Italy Letters, is scheduled for publication by Melville House in 2024. In the same year, she will release a co-authored manuscript titled, The Six Tones of Water with Sun Yung Shin, through Ricochet. Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi Khi Nao received the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.

https://www.vikhinao.com

Stephanie Catlett is a singer-songwriter who lives in Iowa City with her cats. Her music references folk, Americana, and indie influences, creating a sound that is comfortable and unassuming with sharp songwriting that leaves a lingering impression.

Catlett's lyrics explore the quiet spaces between separate lives, and the sometimes-imperceptible cracks that appear when love and faith fall apart. Her songs are peopled with the lonely, the impetuous, and the flawed — and her stories reflect the complicated nature of being.

DK Nnuro is a Ghanaian-born writer and a graduate of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa (UI). He is currently curator of special projects at the Stanley Museum of Art at UI and adjunct assistant professor in the English Department there. His debut novel, What Napoleon Could Not Do (2023), was one of Barack Obama’s 2023 Summer Reading List picks and the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award in Fiction. The book was also shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and The New American Voices Award.

Upcoming readers and performers will include Brian Johannesen, Jordan Sellergren, Lyz Lenz, Amy Margolis and Daneil Kalatstchi, and Margaret Yapp. Single and season tickets are available!