The literary gifts of more than a dozen area teens will be both celebrated and showcased in a special outdoor event on August 19, with the Rock Island venue Rozz-Tox hosting a release and pre-order party for the Midwest Writing Center's 16th edition of literary journal THE ATLAS, an evening boasting performances of original work by 17 gifted and burgeoning talents.

Praised by Music Mayhem Magazine for her “unique sound, authentic artistry, and undeniably catchy songs,” rising country-music sensation Allie Colleen plays a headlining concert at East Moline venue The Rust Belt on August 20, arriving a mere four months after the release of her critically acclaimed debut album Stones.

Instantly familiar pop hits from a boy-band tribute act and a chart-topping female sensation will be heard directly outside Jumer's Casino & Hotel on August 20, with the Rock Island venue hosting a lakeside-patio concert with '80s-music icon Tiffany and the touring Chicago talents of The Boy Band Night.

An eagerly awaited day of outdoor fun culminating in an attempt to break a pair of Guinness World Records is set for August 21, when River Action hosts the 12th-annual celebration of paddle sports Floatzilla, with participants and spectators gathering at Rock Island's Sunset Park to see if the Quad Cities can boast the world's “Largest Raft of Canoes and Kayaks” and “Largest Simultaneous Kayak Launch.”

An operatic collaboration between award-winning filmmaker Ed Robbins, composer Richard Marriott, and artist Lesley Dill, Divide Light will enjoy a special August 19 screening at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, the film contemporizing the works of poet Emily Dickinson, linking the groundbreaking ideas of the mid-19th-century American Transcendental movement to innovations and global concerns in today’s rapidly changing world.

With the night's unforgettable songs including “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Midnight Rambler,” “You Can't Always Get What You Want,” and a host of classics from iconic albums Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, Quad City Bank & Trust and the Quad City Symphony Orchestra, on August 21, present LeClaire Park's latest Riverfront Pops spectacle The Music of the Rolling Stones: Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, 1969, a rockin' park party boasting guest artist, lead singer, and international Mick Jagger tribute artist Mick Adams.

Delivered as part of the Davenport Public Library's virtual 3rd Thursday at Hoover's Presidential Library & Museum programming, the August 19 Zoom webinar The Lafayette Escadrille will tell the heroic tale of how 38 Americans volunteered to fly, and pay the ultimate price, in the First World War – fighting in the skies to aid France long before our country officially entered the war.

Nearly two dozen gifted area musicians will be on hand – and in two Quad Cities locations – when Polyrhythms proudly presents the 2021 Bill Bell Jazz & Heritage Festival, an August 21 and 22 celebration of cultural heritage in the Quad Cities named after the late musician, educator, and East Moline native lovingly known as “The Jazz Professor.”

Described by the Windy City Times as “an archly manipulative psycho-thriller” that “holds your attention like a leash,” author Douglas Post's fiendishly witty thriller Murder in Green Meadows enjoys an August 19 through 28 run at Moline's Black Box Theatre, the show a recipient of six Emmy nominations when performed on television by Chicago's legendary Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

Appearing in the long-awaited grand re-opening show at Maquoketa's Codfish Hollow Barn, folk- and alternative-rock icon Ani DiFranco, on August 19, headlines the first Barn concert in more than a year, the artist's most recent album Revolutionary Love described by The New Yorker as boasting “robust melodies, padded with streaks of soul and jazz, that represent some of DiFranco's fullest productions yet.”

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