Mission Creek Festival is a 3-day music and literature festival that takes place every spring in downtown Iowa City, Iowa. The festival thrives on intimacy and visceral connections between artists and audiences. We host events indoors at traditional venues and local shops converted into performances spaces solely for the festival.

Schedule of Events:

April 4, 2024:

6:00 PM: Tisa Bryant - Hancher

Tisa Bryant is the author of hybrid essay collection Unexplained Presence. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced literary journal, The Encyclopedia Project, and collaborates with Ernest Hardy on The Black Book series of visual mixtape love letters to black people and black culture, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Why Are They So Afraid of the Lotus?, Lana Turner, and Letters to the Future: BLACK Women/RADICAL Writing, as well as various arts exhibition catalogs and shows, including the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2022 Artist-in-Residence program. Unexplained Presence will be reissued by Wave Books in 2024, and her next book, Residual, a meditation on grief, intimacy and the archive, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. A Boston native and longtime resident of Los Angeles, Bryant is Assistant Professor in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and lives in Iowa City.

6:00 PM: Hanif Abdurraqib - Hancher

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. His newest release, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award . In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, (2017) was named a book of the year by Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune, among others.

Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest (2019) was a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

7:30 PM: L’Rain - Hancher

L’Rain’s artistic evolution eschews overarching narratives. Multi-layered in subject and form, L’Rain’s sonic explorations interrogate instead how multiplicities of emotion and experience intersect with identity. The experimental and the hyper-commercial; the expectation and the reality; the hope and the despair. L’Rain is searching for balance in the obliteration of binary logic.

L’Rain is the musical project of multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer, and curator, Taja Cheek. Alongside Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, she has developed L’Rain into a shape-shifting entity that blurs the distinction between band and individual. At once personal and collaborative, it mirrors the journey that brought L’Rain into being to begin with.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Cheek found her feet at the centre of a vibrant DIY community in the first half of the 2010s, playing noise music and hosting concerts in her basement with the likes of Dreamcrusher and TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone.

If noise music represented a release from the constraints of her classical training, the loops and samples she admired in bands like Animal Collective liberated Cheek to make music on her own terms. Using her voice to work up ideas recorded with her iPhone microphone, she uploaded sonic fragments onto Soundcloud to share with friends and early collaborators like Andrew Lappin.

Beginning as an abstract meditation on grief, Cheek traces the origins of L’Rain to the period which followed the dissolution of her musical community and the passing of her mother, Lorraine. The name L’Rain was conceived as both a tribute to her mother and her own gregarious alter ego L’ (lah-postrophe), and one which she subsequently tattooed onto her arm.

Fascinated by the collisions of hi- and lo-fi technology, she teased out the crunched aesthetics from the equipment that was available to her, playing with home-spun recording approaches alongside professional recording techniques on her self-titled 2017 debut album L’Rain, which has been described as a form of “psychic collage”.

In the years that followed, Cheek began working more closely with Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, who have become invaluable collaborators as part of the L’Rain project,guiding Cheek in the expression of her voice, both on record and in a live setting. “Ben and Andrew are my closest collaborators and confidants”, she explains, embracing the project’s potential to challenge the foundations of what a band can be.

Probing notions of change on what would become her 2021 album, Fatigue, Cheek supplemented her vocals with an array of instruments, including guitar, bass, synth, keyboards, percussion, and various effect pedals and plugins, assembling a cast of twenty collaborators, to formalise a more collective idea of creative practice.

Released into a context of a global pandemic, systemic inequality, and the continued violence against Black people at the hands of the state, Fatigue explored simultaneity of human emotion – audacity in the wake of grief, disappointment in the face of accomplishment – at once asking questions of both herself and her listeners.

Critically acclaimed by NPR, named album of the year in The Wire magazine and #2 in Pitchfork’s best albums of 2021, Fatigue propelled L’Rain towards a new audience, while further cementing her place within experimental and art institutional spaces. And yet, equally inspired by gospel and ‘90s R&B, and touring with Black Midi and Animal Collective, Cheek is conscious of not allowing this narrative to dominate.

“I’m not really interested in being separate from the world,” she explains, pointing to new album I Killed Your Dog as a way to bring the project back to earth. “I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek explains. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.”

Written amidst heartbreaks from the perspective of an earned maturity, I Killed Your Dog is described as an “anti-break-up” record. It takes the universal pop theme of love as its starting point - bold, bratty and even a touch diabolical – and inspects it through the form of a conversation with her younger self, untangling her relationship with femininity and the formal musical conventions that others have come to expect of her.

A crystallization of L’Rain’s tactile approach to song-writing, the album is also an implicit interrogation of the electric dreams and failures of early synthesizers, toying openly with rock music tropes, the lineage of folk as Black music in America and Cheek’s own background playing in experimental guitar bands.

8:45 PM: Neko Case - Hancher

Neko Case steps out, cutting the sky and singing the stars, spinning fury and mercy as she goes. She loves the world and wears her heart on her sleeve, but she might eat it before you get to thinking it belongs to you.

Wild Creatures pulls together some high points of feral joy from twenty-one years of solo work by Neko Case. The Virginian marked Neko’s debut as a solo artist in 1997. She delved into darkness in 2000 with Furnace Room Lullaby, scrawled Blacklisted in 2004 and recorded The Tigers Have Spoken live the same year. In 2006, she dreamed Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and in 2009 unleashed Middle Cyclone. She plumbed her own life in 2013 for The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, and raised hell in 2018 with Hell-On. Now in her third decade of recording under her own name, she’s just getting started.

Is there another songwriter so fearless and inventive?Bending decades of pop music into new shapes, she wields her voice like a kiss and her metaphors like a baseball bat. She has cast the fishing net of her career wide—from Seattle and Vancouver to Chicago and Stockholm, setting up her home base on a farm in New England.

Gathering power year after year, Neko sings with the fierce abandon of a newborn infant crying in a basket in the woods. Since escaping the labels of country and Americana, the gorgeous train-whistle vocals of her early career sit submerged in her later style, where their ghost can appear any minute. When her voice jumps an octave, it’s almost visible, like sparks at night. “I never knew where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do with my voice,” she says, “but I just wanted to do it so bad.”

The world tends to love women singer-songwriters most when they’re wounded and helpless. Neko’s music spans a broader spectrum, from longing to malice. Her lyrics evoke worlds, imagining a woman pilot ready to die, a serial killer, a murdered child, and a tornado, just for starters. Is there any perspective she can’t write a song from or about? “I am a man,” she sings. “I am the man in the ******* moon.”

The Earth, too, and nature itself are wonders for her, from the dangerous attention of dandy wolves to a slaughtered tiger and birds frying on a wire. The world is dear to her, but there’s a lot happening in it that shouldn’t. It’s not her job to comfort you.

April 5, 2024:

5:00 PM - 8:30 PM: 2024 Lit Walk - Downtown Iowa City

The annual MCF Lit Walk returns in 2024 with several rounds of speakers at your favorite local hotspots. Bringing Iowa City to life in new ways, hear an unexpected variety of work from a mix of talented local and out-of-town writers. Stay tuned for more information on featured readers and local business locations.

7:15 PM: Single File - Riverside Theatre

Single File is two best friends using music to explore social, spiritual and emotional territories, conjuring both dancing and trance-like states, with vocals likened to Bjork and Imogen Heap.

7:30 PM: Strangers of Necessity - Gabe's

Strangers Of Necessity are an American hip-hop duo, based in the Midwest, consisting of prolific producer, CoryaYo and veteran lyricist, Fooch the MC. They linked via twitter and quickly became friends, sparking an immediate chemistry and need to make quality music together; hence the name Strangers Of Necessity. They instantly began recording music and doing shows locally, generating a nice buzz in the area. Their sound is best described as a fresh take on that golden era of hip-hop, blending tasteful jazz and soul samples, crisp snares, boomy kicks on wonky patterns with a soulful delivery, dense schemes and potent punch-lines that hit peaks before unseen. With their new single “Abundance” getting some looks and a new album set to drop later this spring, Strangers Of Necessity are geared up and ready to bring you fresh beats and rhymes that speak to right now; giving you that feeling that can only be described as “goose bump music.” Two people, two different worlds, one common goal… make good music.

For fans of Slum Village, A Tribe called Quest, De La Soul and Madlib.

8:00 PM: George Clanton - The Englert

George Clanton doesn’t just produce gleaming electronic pop, he produces nostalgia too. The Los Angeles artist’s process involves tweaking synthesizer presets, but beyond searching for the right melodies and textures, he’s hoping to come upon a sound that strikes a spiritual chord. “I’m looking for something that triggers a memory or an emotion,” he says. His lyrics are direct transmissions from his soul: raw, often off-the-cuff, evocative. When you pair those words with the gauzy textures Clanton’s become known for, his music feels like a dreamy filter you can put over your own memories. Every moment feels a little more colorful, a little more comforting.

You can hear the impact of this approach in his upcoming third album—take fuzz-pop anthem “******* Up My Life.” The track is both raucous and soothing, and as Clanton’s distorted croons echo across swelling synths and crushing breakbeats, he offers a mantra: “It feels alright.”

It’s a fitting return for an artist who’s spent the last decade cutting through the noise. In addition to making music, he runs the 100% Electronica record label with his fellow pop mutator and wife Negative Gemini. He also spearheads events, including weekly livestreams on Twitch. Being extremely online has allowed Clanton’s fans access to the depths of his personality, to connect with his work more deeply. “I think of myself as the ultimate DIY person,” he says. “Working the George Clanton way has made for a really unique career that hasn’t yet been fully recognized.”

Growing up, Clanton knew he wanted to be an entertainer, but he didn’t know how. His hometown of Ridgeway, Virginia, had a NASCAR track but no concert venues or record stores. So MTV was his primary education: videos by artists like 311, The Prodigy, and the Bad Boy Records crew taught the art of showmanship. He downloaded a lot of music from Limewire. During one session, a mislabeled download of what he thought was Oasis turned out to be shoegaze band Brian Jonestown Massacre, opening him up to the vast world of underground music on the internet, which led him to help form the scene that would dream up vaporwave.

Under the monikers ESPRIT and Mirror Kisses, Clanton became a key figure of the early vaporwave scene through his meditative lo-fi productions. The genre was then known primarily for its use of samples, but his 2014 album virtua.zip was a landmark: the first of its kind to be built entirely from original compositions. He also started singing on his tracks back then, adding a human touch and another layer of emotional involvement to the developing genre. In 2015, he dropped both aliases in favor of his given name, a symbolic shedding of creative restraints.

In order to reproduce his internet success offline, Clanton hustled harder. Moving to Brooklyn in 2015, where he worked a day job and made music at night, provided that motivation. Seeking a label but unwilling to compromise, he started his own. The label and his first album under his birth name would share the same moniker: 100% Electronica. His 2018 follow-up, Slide, further revealed his gift for deeply moving pop. One of the album’s most powerful tracks, “You Lost Me There,” was inspired by Negative Gemini leaving for work. The mild melancholy of missing your person for a few hours started to feel like the end of the world: “I just didn’t want to be alone because the house was empty,” Clanton says. “I try to find the extreme in the mundane.”

Clanton has also curated a tightly knit roster of artists ( Negative Gemini, Satin Sheets, Small Black, et al.) who continue to push the boundaries of vaporwave, internet music, and pop. He considers 100% Electronica his biggest achievement, pointing to the dedicated fans that see themselves in the music. “I feel like we’ve created a cultural identity out of thin air,” he says.

Clanton expanded upon that in 2019 with 100% ElectroniCON, the first vaporwave music festival, to give the community a physical space in which to interact. When live events were paused in 2020, he stayed connected through Virtual Utopia concerts, where artists perform in panoramic virtual reality environments, and weekly VR talk show THE BIG STREAM. Even though he had no framework for programming, Clanton taught himself to code using Python and C# languages in order to make these shows. He found a way to stay busy musically too. In a full-circle moment, he got to team up with one of his childhood inspirations, working with 311 frontman Nick Hexum on their psychedelic album George Clanton & Nick Hexum (2020), which landed Clanton on the Billboard charts for the first time (Top 100 Current Album Sales).

After a year spreading out across a number of projects, Clanton is now focusing on delivering a powerful sequel to Slide. Started almost immediately after Slide’s release, the new album finds him both musically and personally matured. It’s an elegant merging of all his past musical selves—of stirring rock, sweeping shoegaze, and niche electronics—augmented with more complex layers and physical instruments. It’s also a journey inwards as Clanton emphasizes personal reflection and self-improvement—themes he’s held close his whole career. “It’s definitely something that I need to get out,” he says of the music. “I want people to know that George Clanton is better than ever and something amazing is coming just around the corner.”

8:30 PM: Hatis Noit - Riverside Theatre

Hatis Noit is a Japanese vocal performer hailing from distant Shiretoko in Hokkaido who now resides in London. Her accomplished range is astonishingly self-taught, inspired by everything she could find from Gagaku — Japanese classical music — and operatic styles, Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting, to avant-garde and pop vocalists.

It was at the age of 16, during a trek in Nepal to Buddha’s birthplace, when she realised singing was her calling. While staying at a women’s temple in Lumbini, one morning on a walk Hatis Noit heard someone singing. On further investigation it was a female monk singing Buddhist chants, alone. The sound moved her so intensely she was instantly aware of the visceral power of the human voice; a primal and instinctive instrument that connects us to the very essence of humanity, nature and our universe.

The name Hatis Noit itself is taken from Japanese folklore, meaning the stem of the lotus flower. The lotus represents the living world, while its root represents the spirit world, therefore Hatis Noit is what connects the two. For Hatis Noit, music represents the same netherworld with its ability to move and transport us to the other side; the past, a memory, our subconscious.

9:00 PM: Anthony Worden - Gabe's

Anthony Worden is an Iowa City based singer-songwriter who has made four full length albums since 2017 both solo and with his band, The Illiterati. Little Village says: “Anthony Worden is, in a word, ambitious. He wants to use every color on the palette in his songs — and even in the moments when it’s as much musicology as music, his delight in the source material carries no small joy.” Anthony is due to release his fifth full length album in Spring of 2024 entitled, “Plain Angels”.

9:45 PM: Indigo De Souza - The Englert

“I was finally able to trust myself fully,” says Indigo De Souza of making her masterful third album All of This Will End. When the North Carolina-based artist released her compelling and explosive second LP Any Shape You Take in 2021, it led to a successful year of sold out tours and rave reviews from outlets like Pitchfork, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. Across 11 songs, the LP, which is out April 28 via Saddle Creek, is a raw and radically optimistic work that grapples with mortality, the rejuvenation that community brings, and the importance of centering yourself now. These tracks come from the most resonant moments of her life: childhood memories, collecting herself in parking lots, the ecstatic trips spent wandering Appalachian mountains and southern swamps with friends, and the times she had to stand up for herself. “All of This Will End feels more true to me than anything ever has,” she says.

Indigo finds recent inspiration from community and stability. “Up until recently, my life felt chaotic,” she says. “Now, so much of the chaos is behind me. I have an incredible community, I love where I live, and I’m surrounded by truly incredible people who are dedicated to deep connection and joy. My music feels like it’s coming from a centered place of reflection.” Opener “Time Back” deals with the necessary forward momentum she cherishes. It’s a song about rising out of struggle, putting things in the past, and moving on where she sings over comforting synths, “I feel like I’m leaving myself behind / And I’m so tired of crying / I wanna get back up again.” The track later explodes with her voice booming over a stunning arrangement. “You can fall into dysfunction or sadness, or allow other people to hurt you and not have boundaries,” she says. “There was a time in my life when that was a lot of what I was doing. I thought this track was a sweet way to talk about coming back to yourself, to your true self.”

Alongside the all-encompassing emotions captured in the first song, the album is bookended with the heartfelt and nostalgic closer “Younger and Dumber,” which Indigo chose as the lead single. One of the first songs she wrote for the album, the track began as a way of her speaking to her younger self. “While I was writing about the time when my music first started to take shape, it was also the worst time in my life and the most unstable I’d ever been,” she says. “I wrote this song paying homage to a younger self that didn’t know any better. I was flailing through life, trying to make something stick, and coming to terms with being on earth.” The song is her most intentional yet, where she sings, “You came to hurt me in all the right places / Made me somebody.” Though the track starts as a whisper, it slowly unfolds to something cathartic and explosive as she belts out, “And the love I feel is so very real it can take you anywhere.” With the clarity that comes with experience and healing, Indigo treats her past self with immense kindness. It’s her most stunning offering yet.

Creatively reenergized from having these songs pour out of her so quickly, Indigo and her band went to Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios with producer and engineer Alex Farrar, who also worked on Any Shape You Take. “We just clicked so hard,” she says. “We had such an organic energy flow and we felt really inspired by each other.” Tracks like the pummeling “Wasting Your Time” and the muscular single “You Can Be Mean” highlight the band at their most defiant and locked-in. With lines on the latter like, “I’d like to think you got a good heart and your dad was just an ******* growing up,” Indigo says it’s “about the last horrible guy that I let push me around.” While she lets her band loose in the arrangements, especially guitarist Dexter Webb and drummer Avery Sullivan, these songs come from her own vision. “This time, I was more true to myself and refused to allow other people’s ideas to shape what my songs sound like,” she says. “It also feels really special because Dexter was able to fully express his freaky alien guitar voicings, and played a larger role in the production.”

All of This Will End boasts songs that run the gamut of human emotion. There’s pain and sadness, sure, but there’s a triumphant spirit of resilience throughout. Take the single “Smog,” which is exuberant, danceable, and about the exhilaration that comes from breaking out of daily monotony. Elsewhere, she’s introspective, like in the soul-shattering “Always,” which excavates her relationship with her father. But in the single “The Water,” she transforms a childhood memory of visiting her best friend into a meditation on growing up and the fragility of relationships. Over a programmed drum beat, she sings, “I think about what it was like / That summer when we were young and you did it with that guy in his car.” Though she’s no longer as close to that person as she was when they were kids, there’s power in reminiscing.

In many ways, All of This Will End has become a personal motto for Indigo. “Every day I wake up with the thought that this could be the end,” she says. “You could look at it as a sad thing, or you could look at it as a really precious thing: Today I’m alive and at some point, I will not be in this body anymore. But for now, I can do so much with being alive.” There’s a peacefulness in acceptance throughout. As she sings on the title track, “I’m only loving only moving through and trying my best / Sometimes it’s not enough but I’m still real and I forgive.” She describes the experience of writing this song as “magic,” as if everything about it from the words and melody had felt timeless and intangible and that she was just writing it down. Like the hues of reds and oranges that her mother painted on the LP cover, All of This Will End marks a warmer and unmistakably audacious era for her. It’s a statement about fearlessly moving forward from the past into a gratitude-filled present, feeling it all every step of the way, and choosing to embody loving awareness.

10:00 PM: Sunny War - Riverside Theatre

“I feel like there are two sides of me,” says the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitar virtuoso known as Sunny War. “One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced.” That’s the central conflict on her fourth album, the eclectic and innovative Anarchist Gospel, which documents a time when it looked like the self-destructive side might win out. “Everybody is a beast just trying their hardest to be good. That’s what it is to be human. You’re not really good or bad. You’re just trying to stay in the middle of those two things all the time, and you’re probably doing a ****** job of it. That’s okay, because we’re all just monsters.”

Extreme emotions can make that battle all the more perilous, yet from such trials Sunny has crafted a set of songs that draw on a range of ideas and styles, as though she’s marshaling all her forces to get her ideas across: ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant garde studio experiments (like the collage of voices that closes “Shelter and Storm”). She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs throughout every song.

It’s a style she’s been honing for most of her life, at least since she took her first guitar lessons and fell in love with music. “When I was a kid, I was obsessed with AC/DC, and I loved dramatic ‘80s guitar bands like Motley Crüe. Later, I was obsessed with Bad Brains, the Minutemen, and X.” True to the punk ethos, her first punk band, the Anus Kings, made music with whatever they had at hand, and what they had at hand were acoustic guitars. That made them stand out among other Los Angeles groups at the time, and today Sunny is the rare roots artist who covers Ween and can drop a Crass reference into a song (as she does on “Whole”). “I don’t really make music with a traditional roots audience in mind. I like weird music, outsider music, like Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson.”

Even as she was developing a guitar style that married acoustic punk to country blues, those two sides of Sunny were already at odds. As a teenager, she began drinking heavily, which led to her dropping out of school. She played punk shows, stole and chugged bottles of vodka, and quickly became addicted to heroin and meth. For money she busked along the boardwalks in Venice Beach, recording an album to sell out of her guitar case and letting that self-destructive side win most of the battles. But “the body can’t handle both heroin and meth,” she explains. “When you’re young, it’s hard to gauge that you’re killing yourself.” A series of seizures landed her in a sober living facility in Compton, so emaciated that she could only wear children’s pajamas.

Music remained a lifeline, and she fell in with a crew at Hen House Studios in Venice, where over the years she made a series of albums and EPs, including 2018’s With the Sun and 2021’s Simple Syrup. Twelve years after she kicked meth and heroin, Sunny is remarkably candid about this time in her life. “Everyone I loved died before they reached 25. They OD’ed or killed themselves. We were just kids who didn’t have anyone looking out for us. You’re not supposed to know so much about death at such a young age. Maybe that’s why I write a lot about not taking **** for granted, because it always feels like something’s about to happen.”

10:45 PM: Armand Hammer - Gabe's

Armand Hammer, the New York based hip-hop duo consisting of ELUCID and billy woods, return with We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, their first album in two years and first for Fat Possum. In the 2 years since the Alchemist produced Haram, ELUCID and billy woods have both released critically acclaimed solo albums. Back with their biggest record yet, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips features production from JPEGMAFIA, EL-P, Kenny Segal, Black Noi$e, Preservation, DJ Haram, Child Actor, Sebb Bash, August Fanon, and more, and will be released in full September 29th. Available to preorder now (while supplies last).

April 6, 2024:

Sarah Minor:

Sarah Minor is the author of Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press 2021), Bright Archive (Rescue Press 2020), and The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated (Essay Press 2016). She’s the recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and an Individual Research Grant to Iceland from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. She serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry Section Editor at TriQuarterly Review and teaches in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.

Lynne Nugent:

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.

Walid Rachedi:

Walid Hajar Rachedi was born in France in 1981 and spent several years in Latin America and the US. His debut novel Qu’est-ce que j’irais faire au paradis? was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize for a debut novel in 2022, and his second novel, Nos destins sont liés, was published in September, 2023.

He is also the co-founder and director of Frictions, an online media platform, widely renowned for its podcast series, which investigate global social issues in a long-form narrative style.

He is currently co-writing a film screenplay, produced for television by Alain Pancrazi (Brain Productions).

Thea Brown:

Originally from the Hudson Valley in New York, Thea Brown is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She is the author of the chapbook We Are Fantastic (Petri Press 2013) and the full-length poetry collections Think of the Danger (H_NGM_N 2016), Famous Times (Slope Editions 2019), and Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Poems can be found in Oversound, Denver Quarterly, Pinwheel, the Iowa Review, LitHub, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, where she’s been the Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School and a Rubys Artist Project Grant awardee, as well as the recipient of a UCross Foundation fellowship and the 2020 Art Alliance Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.

Cindy Juyoung Ok:

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Yale Younger Poets Prize-winning Ward Toward. A MacDowell Fellow, Kenyon Review Fellow, and poetry editor at Guernica magazine, she is a former high school science teacher and now teaches creative writing at Kenyon College. Her poems are out now or soon in New England Review, Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review.

Hadara Bar-Nadav:

Hadara Bar-Nadav is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, and other honors. Her books include The Animal Is Chemical (Four Way Books, 2023), awarded the Levis Prize in Poetry; The New Nudity (Saturnalia Books, 2017); Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia Books, 2013), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), Editor’s Selection/Runner Up for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007), awarded the Margie Book Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace (Tupelo Press, 2015), awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Show Me Yours (Laurel Review/Green Tower Press 2010), awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize. In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. (Pearson, 2011). Her poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Zachary Pace:

Zachary Pace is a writer and editor who lives in New York City, whose writing has been published in the Baffler, BOMB, Bookforum, Boston Review, Frieze magazine, Interview magazine, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the PEN Poetry Series, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. I Sing to Use the Waiting is their first book.

11:00 AM - 6:00 PM: 7th Annual I.C.E. C.R.E.A.M Zine Fair - PS1 Close House

Join us for the 7th annual Iowa City Expo for Comics and Real Eclectic Media (I.C.E. C.R.E.A.M.) Zine Fair, presenting the work of local cartoonists, zinesters, and art books/handmade book artists. Stay tuned for more information on vendors!

12:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Small Press & Literary Magazine Book Fair - Spare Me! Bowling Alley

Not to be missed this year is the Small Press and Literary Magazine Book Fair, being hosted inside Spare Me Bowling Alley. This singular event highlights the best of local and national presses, as well as the work of award-winning authors and publishers such as Sarabande Books, Dorothy, a publishing project, Two Dollar Radio, Container, The Iowa Review, and Rescue Press. This year’s featured presses also include:

Fonograf Editions / Split/Lip Press / Flood Editions / American Short Fiction / Europa Editions / Arrowsmith Press / Meekling Press / Perugia Press / PromptPress / Brink / Cleveland Review of Books / Long Day Press / New Moon Magazine / Flexible Press, LLC / Feral House / MWC Press / earthwords: the undergraduate literary review / Ink Lit Magazine / 508 Press / Quartet / Middle West Press LLC / The Mad Duck Coalition

2:30 PM: YXNG RASKAL - Trumpet Blossom Cafe

YXNG RASKAL is an avant-garde punk rap project. noisy, post-apocalyptic music for women that are hot, marginalized, and a little bit evil.

3:00 PM: The Blake Shaw Big(ISH) Band - ReUnion Brewery

The Blake Shaw BIG(ish) Band is an action packed, fun ensuing, dream band lead by bassist/vocalist/educator Blake Shaw of Iowa City. Shaw writes and arranges all the music using the Duke Ellington model of exploiting all his friends’ talents and strengths on their instruments. The show contains many burning solos, grooves for days, and plenty of eye candy. The rest of the band is made up of some of the best improvising musicians Iowa has to offer ranging from music professors, retired band directors, public school educators, and the most popular local musicians.

Blake Shaw is a composer/arranger, bandleader, double/electric bassist, vocalist, private lessons teacher, and jazz professor at Cornell College and Kirkwood Community College. Originally from Lisbon, Iowa, Blake has earned an Associate of Arts degree from Kirkwood Community College as well as a Bachelor of Music (‘13) and Master of Arts (‘17) degree both from the University of Iowa. He has called Iowa City, IA home for the past 14yrs where he has provided insight on festival boards for around half that time for the Iowa City Jazz Festival as well as the Iowa City Pride Fest where he serves as Entertainment Director. Shaw is a frequent performer and band leader in many different groups across Iowa and the US. He can also be found teaching private lessons to young dedicated classical and jazz double bass players. Shaw has had the pleasure of playing with jazz greats like Carmen Bradford, Wycliffe Gordon, Rachel Eckroth, Dave Pietro, O’had Talmor, and Dick Oatts. He’s also been in groups opening for bands like Kurt Elling, Charlie Hunter, Lake Street Dive, Donny McCaslin, Margaret Glaspy, John Raymond and the Real Feels, Bridget Kearney, Caroline Smith, The Marcus King Band, and Euforquestra. You may go “like” all of his cute pics on instagram @theeblakebass

For fans of (FFO): bass, funk, hot people, and a good time

3:30 PM: New Standards Men - Trumpet Blossom Cafe

Committed to experiencing music as it occurs, New Standards Men (NSM for true heads) work through cycles of improvisation and experimentation for long stretches at a time, often building on the bedrock laid by what dirtier minds call ‘jamming’ and is also referred to as ‘stretching’ out. Previous excursions into the motorik mode have given way to a more languid pace, yet one that is no less tense and climactic. NSM’s Drew Bissell and Jeremy Brashaw (the core of this project since 2017) are these days joined by Bob Bucko, Jr. and Isaac Turner, fellow travelers and eager partners on this trip.

4:15 PM: Subatlantic - ReUnion Brewery

Subatlantic, an indie rock band based in the Quad Cities, where Iowa and Illinois meet, features Becca Rice–lead vocals, guitar, and keyboards; Adam Kaul–guitar; Phil Pracht–drums; and Sean Chapman–bass and cello. Subatlantic formed in 2008 and released their first EP, Not Louder But Closer in May of 2015 on Bandcamp. Their first album, Villains, came out in spring of 2019. Using flexibility in arrangements and instrumentation, Subatlantic displays different textures in their songs, creating a unique sound that ranges from dark and sonorous to danceable post-punk. Subatlantic’s new album, Say It Again, is streaming everywhere, and LPs will be out soon.

For fans of (FFO): Yo La Tengo, Low, Throwing Muses, Tears for Fears, Tennis, ALVVAYS

4:45 PM: Bootcamp - Trumpet Blossom Café

Iowa City hardcore punk from the prairie. Bootcamp is a Hardcore Punk band from Iowa City, IA featuring members of Dryad, Piss Exorcist and Death Kill Overdrive. They formed in May, 2023. They released their Demo on August 15th, 2023. Their Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/bootcamphotties

5:30 PM: Dave Helmer Band - ReUnion Brewery

Dave Helmer is a songwriter’s songwriter from eastern Iowa. Helmer has toured across the country for over ten years with his rock pop group Crystal City, and adds the Dave Helmer Band as his newest project.

In addition to his music career, Helmer’s love of guitar is reflected through his work as a professional luthier proudly supporting area musicians.

Helmer’s signature Rock & Roll sound on his newest release “Such a Clown” has honest lyrics, catchy melodies, and ripping guitar work that sticks in your head.

For fans of (FFO): John Couger Mellancamp, Tom Petty, The Replacements

7:00 PM: Live Wire Radio - The James Theater

Live Wire Radio is a dynamically entertaining live radio show that artfully blends conversation and live music. Hosted by NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me’s Luke Burbank and University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program alum Elena Passarello, the seasoned program is produced in Portland, Oregon and will be co-presented live at Mission Creek by Sarabande Books, an independent nonprofit celebrating 30 years of publishing.

7:30 PM: 24thankyou - Riverside Theatre

24thankyou is an unstable collection of distortion and intimacy from Iowa City.

FFO: Beach House, Dijon, The Microphones, 100 Gecs, JPEG Mafia

Members: Emma Parker (She/Her), Scott Griffin (He/Him), Michael Muhlena (He/Him), Nick Wilkins (He/Him), Ethan Traugh (He/Him)

7:45 PM: M Denney - Gabe's

M denney is a sound artist, electronic musician, guitarist, writer, and occasionally lies about being a composer. Her practice focuses on the use of ritualized repetitive action, engaging technology and destructive, uncontrollable recording processes as ways of exploring memory, self, and the construction of our pasts and histories. Called “haunting,” “violently joyful,” and “fever dream tricks-up-her-sleevery,” m’s work looks to build aural spaces for raw, vulnerable intimacy. Her long-running project The Water Will Come uses poetry and performance texts to examine our relationships to nature, and relates ideas of queer experience through the discovery of the self as nature. She is a frequent collaborator with dance and movement artists around her home base in Iowa City. m is a member of sound collective This Machine, a member of experimental guitar group Trio Ampliphonic.

8:00 PM: SG Goodman - The Englert

“No one escapes the marks left behind when it comes to love or the absence of it,” says singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman, describing the inspiration behind her sophomore album Teeth Marks. “Not only are we the ones who bear its indentations, but we’re also the ones responsible for placing them on ourselves and others.”

When the Kentucky native released her debut album, Old Time Feeling, she was rightly coined an “untamed rock n roll truth-teller” by Rolling Stone. The roots-inflected rock n’ roll record saw Goodman lending her gritty, haunting vocals to narrate the dual perspectives of her upbringing as the daughter of a crop farmer, and a queer woman coming out in a rural town.

Now with Teeth Marks, co-produced by Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Drive-By Truckers, Of Montreal) in Athens, Georgia, she picks up the threads of Old Time Feeling. But where her critically acclaimed, Jim James-produced debut zeroed in on the South, reframing misconceptions in slough water-soaked tones, her latest album pulses with downtown Velvet Underground electricity, shifting its focus inward – though never losing Goodman’s searing and universal point of view. Teeth Marks is what you might get if Flannery O’Connor and Lou Reed went on a road trip.

Drawing influences from the aforementioned Velvets, as well as Pavement, Karen Dalton, and Chad VanGaalen, Goodman brings 11 powerful vignettes to life, with a sound that ventures deeper into indie rock and punk territory than she ever has before. Though Teeth Marks is a love album, Goodman doesn’t aim her focus on romantic relationships alone. Instead, she analyzes the way love between communities, families, and even one’s self can be influenced by trauma that lingers in the body. Teeth Marks is about what love actually is, love’s psychological and physical imprint, its light, and its darkness. It’s a record about the love we have or don’t have for each other, and perhaps, more significantly, the love we have or don’t have for ourselves.

8:45 PM: Nadah El Shazly - Riverside Theatre

Nadah el Shazly is a producer, vocalist and sound artist from Cairo, Egypt. Her debut album “Ahwar” radically reinvents the popular music of her homeland from the early 19th century and explores new sonic and harmonic frontiers. Using voice, field recordings and instruments, she creates haunting sound pieces and songforms that hijack the perception of time with their complex layers and dynamic structure.

Backing up her release with extensive worldwide touring through a solo set and a four-piece band, El Shazly has been featured in local and international festivals including Irtijal, Le Guess Who?, REWIRE, Best Kept Secret, Nusasonic, Marfa Myths, amongst others. She continues to compose for film and visual art and has been featured on compilations including Nashazphone’s This is Cairo Not the Screamers and C.A.N.V.A.S.’ s Apocope.

Most recently El Shazly curated the Egyptian Leather Pavillion for Nyege Nyege Festival 2020. She currently hosts a monthly show on Cashmere Radio, Live from Viper Mountain, where she deep-dives into music that fascinates her.

9:00 PM: Sqvce - Gabe's

Shawn Jarrett also known as Sqvce (Space) is a Des Moines-based hip hop artist who has made a name for himself in the music industry. He is known for his exceptional ability to adapt to any flow or beat, making him a versatile artist. With years of experience in the game, Space has honed his skills and has become a seasoned performer, crushing shows with his electrifying stage presence. His music is a reflection of his unique style, blending different genres to create a sound that is truly his own. With his undeniable talent and passion for music, Space is a force to be reckoned with in the hip hop scene.

9:45 PM: Osees - The Englert

Headlining Saturday is San Francisco psych rock band, Osees (formerly known as OCS, The Oh Sees, and Thee Oh Sees). They have released 28 studio albums alongside countless EPs, singles, and even a split with Iowa City songwriter, Paul Carey. The band’s leader, John Dwyer, is regarded as an institution of 21st century garage rock. The ensemble tours extensively and is known for their energetic live shows featuring two full-kit drummers.

11:00 PM: Pelada - Gabe's

Pelada, the duo of singer Chris Vargas and producer Tobias Rochman, broke out of Montreal’s underground warehouse rave scene in 2014 after uploading tracks to Soundcloud which caught the attention of the global dance music scene. They spent the next five years touring the globe extensively before signing with Berlin experimental label PAN in 2019 and releasing their debut LP ‘Movimiento Para Cambio’. A record which Mixmag included in their ‘Best Albums of the Decade’ list, Resident Advisor named it ‘One of the Best Records of 2019’ while DJ Mag asserted “they are a vital and contemporary addition to dance music’s punk cannon”. The LP was featured twice on the godfather of punk Iggy Pop’s BBC6 radio show who personally told his listeners “They always wake me up. I like this.”

Their collaboration is a blend of urgent Spanish language vocals centered around themes of power, control, social justice with hardware samplers, synths, and drum machines. The unique sound has led them to perform in many different contexts, whether it be entire tours opening for more traditional punk acts like Iceage and Shame, to the exact opposite, performing live during peak times at techno clubs such as Berghain.

In 2023, Pelada return to the live stage for a 3-part world tour. Part 1, which concluded in June, included stops in Italy, Switzerland, Japan, and Australia. Part 2 will see them visit the USA, Canada, France, and Germany in support of their highly anticipated 2nd album ‘Ahora Más Que Nunca,’ which they are self-releasing. The new album features notable guest appearances, including Zambian-Canadian rapper and 2020 Polaris Prize winner Backxwash and trumpet player Aquiles Navarro (of Irreversible Entanglements, Impulse! Records).

Both Pelada’s sound and ethos translate to a galvanizing live show that will spring dancefloors to action in festival contexts, switched-on club zones, and punk bunkers alike.

Dates: April 4 - 6, 2024

Location:

Various Venues,
Iowa City, IA 52240.

Buy Tickets

Click here for more information.