Schedule of Events:

10:00 AM: Little Engines presents: MORNING, *******

1:00 PM: Deep Vellum with Will Evans

Will Evans is a publisher, translator, and entrepreneur with a knack for finding undertold, outstanding stories and connecting them to audiences. In 2013, Evans founded Deep Vellum Publishing, a nonprofit indie book publisher dedicated to translating the world’s best novels into English for American audiences. Deep Vellum Books followed in early 2016 to serve as a cultural community center with literature at the heart of its programming.

Location: FilmScene Theater 3

2:00 PM: Srikanth Reddy

Srikanth Reddy is a poet, literary editor, and occasional book critic with an interest in inkblots, underworlds, erasures, and uncertain translations, among other topics. Since 2003, he has taught at the University of Chicago, where he offers courses on parody, obscenity, and contemporary literary publishing.

His latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a 2020 TLS Book of the Year. It has been described as “a multiverse, a few novels packed in one poetry collection, a delightful and ironic autobiography of a university professor of literature, a book full of disturbingly poetic moments and ironic quizzes, a guided tour to hell” (Griffin Prize judges’ citation). His previous book, Voyager, was named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and National Public Radio. His first collection, Facts for Visitors, won the 2005 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Excerpts and reviews of Underworld Lit, Voyager, and Facts for Visitors are available on his website.

Currently, Reddy serves as the poetry editor of The Paris Review and, along with Rosa Alcalá, Douglas Kearney, and Katie Peterson, edits the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. In 2022, he guest-edited three special issues of Poetry magazine. These issues, along with his podcasts for the magazine—where topics like elevator operators, ghosts, and more are discussed—are available online.

Reddy occasionally writes about contemporary poetry for publications like The New York Times and Lana Turner. In 2012, Oxford University Press published his critical study, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry. A book of his lectures on poetry, The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures, will be published by Wave Books in the future. His website invites visitors to explore these works and more.

Location: FilmScene Theater 3

2:45 PM: Samuel Locke Ward
Music - Folk-Rock

Samuel Locke Ward is a veteran avant-pop songwriter, home taper and comic zine maker.  Starting in the late 90’s he has released over 60+ DIY issue records both as a solo recording artist as well as recordings with bands and collaborators such as Miracles Of God, Jad Fair and Samuel Locke Ward, BBJR + SLW, Boundless Relaxation and SLW cc Watt. He has put out records on Kill Rock Stars, Already Dead, Orb Tapes and Unread Records.

Location: Trumpet Blossom Cafe

3:00 PM: Ryan Joseph Anderson
Music - Singer/Songwriter

Ryan Joseph Anderson’s solo career began in April 2014 with the release of his debut album, The Weaver’s Broom. The album, engineered and co-produced by Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Hooray for the Riff Raff), was hailed as one of the best Americana records of the year. Songs from The Weaver’s Broom made “best of” lists for Daytrotter and Songpickr and were featured in Paste and Magnet. American Songwriter said that Anderson “evokes the open-tunings of Nick Drake as well as the barroom howl of Tom Waits.” Before going solo, Anderson was known as the bandleader and songwriter for the beloved Chicago roots outfit Go Long Mule, as a guitar slinger for garage-rockers Rambos, and as a producer, sessions man and sideman for numerous artists. His influences range from country blues to psychedelic rock and are on prominent display in his masterful guitar playing and songwriting. Anderson’s sophomore release, City of Vines was released in the summer of 2017 to critical acclaim. He toured extensively in support of the record and has shared the stage with such acts as Robert Earl Keene, Honey Honey, Robbie Fulks, Charlie Parr, and Amy Helm.

Location: The TUESDAY Agency at the Chauncey

3:00 PM: Torrey Peters
Literature - Prairie Lights Reading Series

Torrey Peters is the bestselling author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and an MA in comparative literature from Dartmouth. Peters rides a pink motorcycle and splits her time between Brooklyn and an off-grid cabin in Vermont.

Location: Prairie Lights Bookstore

3:15 PM: Ion Alexakis
Music - Hip Hop

An Iowa-based Noisemaker. MPC Universe. Chameleon. Tradesman.

Ion wields a dynamic lyricism that centers liberatory values and rhetoric, making full use of multi-genre instrumental craftsmanship honed in through the MPC universe. Fresh off the release of his EP “Broken Glass” in January ’25, his music lays across a hip-hop canvass of familiarity with darkness and exhaustion from prolonged push against the worlds imbalances. He will be joined by a live band, Blake Shaw (Bass/Cello) Tara McGovern (Fiddle) and Justin Leduc (Drums)

Location: Reunion Brewery

3:45 PM: Nadalands
Music - Indie Folk

Are the Nadalands found in the abandoned periphery of Caribbean cities or are they all around us? Amidst a strummed 12-string acoustic guitar, ambient soundscapes, and foreboding drones, Colorado-based songwriter John Lindenbaum (The Lonelyhearts, Rust Belt Music, The Distances) answers this question with densely lyrical tales of apocalyptic nostalgia. Two decades of live shows have featured stories of societal discord, prophetic clairvoyance, imperial decline, environmental collapse, and doomed romance. The Days of Awe LP, the 15th record by Nadalands, was released in 2023.

Location: The TUESDAY Agency at the Chauncey

3:45 PM: Slacker
Music - Alt-Rock

Slacker is two buddies from Iowa City who make ****-Fueled Experimental Noise Rock.

Location: The Trumpet Blossom Cafe

4:15 PM: Jack Lion
Music - Jazz/Electronic

One of Iowa City’s premier bands, Jack Lion’s sound is a one-a-kind gem in the Iowa music landscape. Mixing some traditional jazz sounds with electronic music, Jack Lion’s music would please both Miles Davis and Nine Inch Nails fans.

Location: Reunion Brewery

4:30 PM: Golden Birds
Music - Singer/Songwriter

DC-born, Bay Area-bred, and Brooklyn-based, Golden Birds play literate experimental pop by turns labyrinthine and intimate — emphasis on the latter when in Iowa City, one of their favorite places in the world.

Location: The TUESDAY Agency at the Chauncey

4:45 PM: Good Habits
Music - Punk

Location:  The Trumpet Blossom Cafe

5:15 PM: Alexis Stevens
Music - Singer/Songwriter

Alexis Stevens is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter. Originally from Iowa, she bounced around western states in her 20s before returning to her roots, landing in Iowa City from 2008 to 2012. There, her favorite music memories were made, due in no small part to Mission Creek Festival. She independently released her debut album, Flood or Drought, in 2008 and self-titled sophomore album in 2012. The following year, she relocated to Nashville, where she continues to write songs and deejay on a community radio station. Her third album, The Long Blink, was released in 2022.

Location: The TUESDAY Agency

5:30 PM: Jordan Sellergren
Music - Indie

Jordan Sellergren is a musician, songwriter, artist and mother. She’s releasing her third full-length album this spring.

Location: Reunion Brewery

7:00 PM: Sun Centauri
Music - Pop/R&B

Sun Centauri is a future pop/R&B collaboration featuring wavy production from Jim Swim and soaring vocals from Alyx Rush. Whether writing summer bops or midnight laments, the duo prioritizes emotion through experimental sound design, harmony stacks, and live instrumentation. With two standout EPs already released under their individual names (Fruit to the Knife and After the Last Time), their first official Sun Centauri single, “Two Shots,” will be out on August 2nd ahead of a fall EP release.

Location: Riverside Theatre

Neko Case in reading and conversation with Melissa Febos
Reading and Conversation with Neko Case

An unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary life—one forged through a poverty-stricken childhood in “slummy, one-horse towns”; obsessive desire; bursts of comedy; and indispensable friendships, reflecting on the way art, music, and a deep connection to nature helped her on a singular journey to become a beloved, Grammy-nominated artist.

Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans. In The Harder I Fight The More I Love You, Case brings her trademark candor and precision to a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisible girl “raised by two dogs and a space heater” in rural Washington state to her improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed talent. In luminous, sharp-edged prose, Case shows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, and to channel the monotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience into art.

The Harder I Fight The More I Love You is a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face.

Melissa Febos is the author of five books, including the national bestselling essay collection, GIRLHOOD, which has been translated into ten languages and was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and named a notable book of 2021 by NPR, Time, The Washington Post, and others. Her craft book, BODY WORK (2022), was also a national bestseller, an LA Times Bestseller, and an Indie Next Pick. A new memoir, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred. A. Knopf on June 3, 2025.

Location: Voxman

7:30 PM: Supersonic Piss
Music - Punk

Supersonic Piss is a noisy and spastic punk band that calls Iowa City home. Taking influence from bands like Melt Banana, AIDS Wolf, and the all important de-tuned and hardly distinguishable melodies and riffage of Flipper, Supersonic Piss play a blown out and somewhat sludge influenced style of hardcore punk that is very unique and ironically distinguished when compared with the rest of the state. After ending an earlier project called Gussy Down, the original incarnation of the band came together as Colin Samek on guitar, Jason Miller on drums, and Josh Hoffman on microkorg, later switching to playing bass.

Location: Gabe's

8:00 PM: William Elliott Whitmore
Music - Folk

Born and raised on a small farm in Lee County Iowa, a love of the land has always been an important part of William Elliott Whitmore’s life. An appreciation for nature and its cycles being taught from an early age. That awareness of birth and death is a constant theme in the songwriting, through a lens of hopefulness and acceptance. These things unify us as people, a theme that is often explored in the music. With a banjo, guitar and kick drum, Whitmore seeks to convey these ideas. For over twenty years he has traveled the world, performing everywhere from Rome, Italy to Rome, Georgia. He’s played basements, backyards, festival stages, and Carnegie Hall, and has no plans to stop anytime soon. “Life is hard, nasty, and unforgiving at times”, Whitmore says, “but it’s beautiful too, and music can be a reminder of what we all have in common, a desire to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

Location: The Englert Theatre

8:15 PM: Dawn Richard + Spencer Zahn
Music - Indie R&B

Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn share a common collaborative ethos, a genuine sense of musical curiosity, and a cosmopolitan eagerness to escape the conventions of genre. That shared vision first brought them together on 2022’s Pigments—icy and warm, stripped-down and grand, familiar and otherworldly—and now it has reunited them for Quiet in a World Full of Noise.

By turns intimate, soul-baring, spectral, and startling, Quiet in a World Full of Noise blends atmospheric and orchestral soundscapes with mellifluous soul, jazz, and journalistic vocalizing—driving it all home with stark, confessional lyricism. The new album finds Richard at her most raw and exposed. This year, Richard’s musician father experienced mini strokes while being diagnosed with cancer; last year, her cousin Cisco was fatally shot seven times in New Orleans. Richard channels the emotional impact of these traumatic experiences of loss into her lyrics and vocal performances, which are left bare and human here, raw and unprocessed across the album. Quiet expands the definitions of what constitutes progressive, avant-garde R&B by rewriting them altogether.

On paper, Richard and Zahn’s audacious, impressionistic musical collaborations feel like a surprising match. Richard, a New Orleans–reared visionary, has had an improbable journey from late 2000s reality television and mainstream pop with girl group Danity Kane to become one of the most prolific, experimental, and visible indie R&B singer-songwriters of the last decade and a half, with seven solo albums under her belt. Zahn is an East Coast–raised multi-instrumentalist and composer working at the intersections of jazz, Americana, classical, and ambient pop. His growing solo discography includes People of the Dawn, Sunday Painter, Pale Horizon, and Statues I & II, as well as the duo’s first release, Pigments. “Pigments was one of the best projects I’ve ever made,” Richard says, “and the furthest I’ve ever been pushed as an artist.” The album was a critical hit, hailed as Best New Music by Pitchfork and receiving praise from Stereogum as Album of the Week, NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily, The Fader, Bitter Southerner, and Edition, among many other publications.

The making of its follow-up, Quiet in a World Full of Noise, began in 2023 in upstate New York. Fresh from a break-up, Zahn sat at his piano and poured himself into writing and recording instrumental compositions. “I wrote all these stream-of-consciousness pieces on piano, and they were eerie, spacious piano tracks,” he says. He used a piano that had been unconventionally tuned to the room rather than to standard pitch. These oddly-tuned, eerie instrumental recordings were never intended to be an album. Six months later, he listened to the recordings again and sent them to Richard. She immediately recognized their potential and said, “Oh, this is the next album.”

Richard went into the studio the next day and wrote and recorded melodies and lyrics to Zahn’s piano recordings. Zahn brought in gifted musicians like Bryan Senti on strings (violin, viola, and violoncello da spalla) and CJ Camerieri on brass (French horn, flugelhorn, and trumpet). In some cases, like on the track “Life in Numbers,” Zahn used only the original first-take piano recording and scratch vocal, resulting in an intimate close-up of both Richard and Zahn.

In its second movement, Quiet’s sound concept becomes fuller and more expansive. While Pigments featured a smaller, more insular group of musicians, Quiet branches out much further, even bringing in the 26-person Budapest Film Orchestra—recorded remotely at 4 a.m.—for the dramatic “Moments for Stillness.” In the album’s third act, spanning the final three tracks “To Remove,” “Ocean Past,” and “Try,” the arrangements become more stripped down and personal. The album’s dynamic movement and intentional sequencing result in a project that feels both intimate and expansive, a bold experiment in emotional storytelling.

“Life in Numbers” cycles through a series of impressionistic memories. Richard describes the song as “a testament to the things I’ve struggled with”—including her once turbulent relationship with her mother, and her father’s illness.

“I remember being at home in New Orleans and I just felt like life was attacking me,” she recalls. “I went into the studio—I did not write this down—and purged it out, and then I didn’t change anything after it. It was honestly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Our family has a distorted view of therapy; I’ve had to do a lot of healing on my own. So this was a moment of severe openness, sharing that moment with the world. But again, for some reason, when I work with Spencer, there’s a vulnerability that I tap into that I don’t do with anyone else. And I’m unafraid to try.”

With Quiet, Zahn and Richard have made an album that serves as a blueprint for stillness, simplicity, and the art of working across differences in the midst of a polarizing cultural climate. Richard describes Quiet in a World Full of Noise as grounding: “Right now, everyone’s a little bit overwhelmed. I hope that this will be the record that people put on when they need the opportunity for reflection, when they need the stillness in their lives, now more than ever.”

Location: Riverside Theatre

9:00 PM: The Tanks
Music - Punk

The Tanks are masters of disguise, pro-level Magic the Gathering players, as well as a bass and drums trio from Iowa City. Although their exact style is hard to pinpoint, influences can be seen in bands like Shallac, Karp, Lightning Bolt, the Vidablue, and most importantly the Jesus Lizard as well as the band Smoke and Smoke. Mix in some black metal riffing and hardcore punk blasting and you’re getting close to what the Tanks sound like.

Location: Gabe's

9:45 PM: Raekwon
Music - Hip Hop

Performing “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx”

Location: The Englert Theatre

10:00 PM: Mark Guiliana
Music - Jazz/Rock

Hailed by The New York Times as “a drummer around whom a cult of admiration has formed,” Grammy-nominated superstar drummer & composer Mark Guiliana brings an adventurous spirit, eclectic palette, and gift for spontaneous invention to a staggering range of styles. Equally virtuosic playing acoustic jazz, boundary-stretching electronic music, or next-level rock, he’s become a key collaborator with such original sonic thinkers as St. Vincent, Matt Cameron (Pearl Jam/Soundgarden), Brad Mehldau, M83, Meshell Ndegeocello, and the late, great David Bowie.

Guiliana’s latest release ‘MARK’, is his first entirely solo work which boldly showcases him as composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist – performing and layering percussion, piano, synthesizers and more. This new foray into his growing body of renowned work, recorded at Studio 606 in Los Angeles, is a culmination of Guiliana’s experiences and inspirations, and at the same time the catalyst of a new direction. ‘MARK’ follows his first two acclaimed Edition Records albums ‘the sound of listening’ and ‘Mischief’.

Location: Riverside Theatre

11:00 PM: Cabeza de Chivo
Music - Latin Pop

Psychedelic tropical band emerging from Chicago. With infectious rhythms and a driving percussion section, guitar, bass, and organs blend seamlessly to deliver addictive dance music and melodic riffs.

Location: Gabe's