Rooftop Music & Reading Series
Fri, Jul 25 | 7-8:30pm PorchLight at MarketHouse: 202 N Linn St

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.

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

Support PorchLight while experiencing some of Iowa’s most exciting artists.

Tickets include drinks, refreshments and gorgeous views! $15-$30

This July we’re delighted to showcase three writers, all multi-hyphenate wonders; Carmen Maria Machado, Tisa Bryant and Becca Klaver.

Our singing and songwriting musician is Abbie Sawyer!

Performer Bios:

Abbie Sawyer performs and records as a solo artist, as well as with Diplomats of Solid Sound, NOLA Jazz Band, and The Night Lights with a sonic range from retro soul to New Orleans jazz, Americana and women-led Folk. Abbie has shared billings with The Righteous Babes, Rufus Wainwright, Leyla McCalla, Lake Street Dive, The New Mastersounds, and Fitz & the Tantrums. She has toured internationally and her projects have over 40 million streams on Spotify. Find her at abbiesawyer.com.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles, and a finalist for a 2010 LAMBDA literary award. Her essays have appeared in exhibition catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Suné Woods and Cauleen Smith, and is forthcoming in the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Experimental Women Writers, and in a catalogue of site-specific art from The New School. She has done numerous presentations of cinema essays, most recently at ALOUD’s “School of Prince” event at the Los Angeles Public Library, and at “Speak Nearby,” a symposium of text and performance inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha. Tisa Bryant was a commissioned writer/researcher for Radio Imagination, Clockshop’s year-long Los Angeles celebration of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, in collaboration with the Huntington Library in Pasadena, which houses the Octavia E. Butler Papers. She is working on The Curator, a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema. Residual, a meditation on grief, longing, desire and archival research, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.

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. As an editor, she co-founded Switchback Books, is co-editor of the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books, 2024), and has created pop-up projects such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants. She lives in Iowa City, where she works as Program Manager of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.