Meghan Malachi NO LACE FRONTS IN IOWA CITY

June 20 | In-Store | 4:00 PM

Meghan Malachi, No Lace Fronts In Iowa City

Meghan Malachi’s debut collection, (Madville Publishing) explores how community, desirability, and notions of home influence the journeys by which girls come of age. Favorite wigs and reimagined anti-heroines make appearances in this love letter to female kinship.The book publishes in June, and Dawn Tefft and Tracy Zeman will join Megan for a live reading and discussion. Followed by a book-signing.

Doors and minibar open at 5:30PM

Getting here: We are located at 1620 Orrington Avenue, in downtown Evanston, just one block east of the Davis Street Metra and CTA public transit stops. There is metered street parking as well as numerous parking garages nearby.

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explores how community, desirability, and notions of home influence the journeys by which girls come of age. These poems celebrate a South Bronx childhood and navigate a complicated womanhood in the Midwest through confessional musings on Black Latinx identity and intimate epistolary interludes. Favorite wigs, main character moments, and reimagined anti-heroines are all vessels for exploring girlhood in this love letter to female kinship. No Lace Fronts in Iowa City is ultimately a testament to the desires for belonging and tenderness that we all harbor.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR NO LACE FRONTS IN IOWA CITY

Say you open a book of poems and discover a voice so familiar that you’re certain you know whom it belongs to even though you’ve never heard anyone or anything speak about the world that way. Say you swear you know the cities and streets, sky and earth, nights and days, names and faces in the poems like the back of your hand, but the voice knows them in ways you’ve never imagined or noticed before. Say you believe you’ve seen, felt, thought, and said it all but maybe not as wildly, honestly, or unashamedly. Say you realize the voice is familiar because it is so humbly human. Then say the voice belongs to Meghan Malachi.

—Mark Turcotte, Illinois Poet Laureate, author of Exploding Chippewas

is a poet and writer from The Bronx, New York. She is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor's Prize Contest and runner-up to the 2024 Princemere Poetry Prize. Her debut collection was selected by Allison Joseph as runner-up to Madville Publishing’s 2024 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in June 2026. Meghan has been a finalist for the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the Trio Book Award, the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, and the Gasher Press Book Award. She is an associate editor at , and she lives in Chicago, Illinois.

books include Once Upon a Riot (Match Factory Editions), Gosling (Anhinga Press), Fist (Dancing Girl Press), and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark). Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, and Fence. She earned a PhD in English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, volunteers as an editor for Packingtown Review, and works as a union representative in Chicago.

is the author of Interglacial (Parlor Press 2026) and Empire (Parlor Press 2020). Writing at the intersection of ecology and culture, habitat and habitation, Tracy Zeman’s work traverses environmental crises, documents endangered and disappeared species, and mediates the moral and ethical implications of this age of ecological unraveling. She teaches writing at the University of Michigan and currently lives outside Detroit, Michigan, with her husband, daughter, and dog, where she hikes and bird watches in all seasons. In 2027, she’ll visit the Arctic Circle with 30 other artists and scientists.

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