With his 2018 book Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to This Country? described by the Washington Post as “lively, stimulating, and pleasantly discursive,” author, pundit, and podcaster Steve Almond serves as the latest guest in Augustana College's River Readings series, his April 9 presentation demonstrating the talents that have won Almond the Blue Mesa Review's Poetry Prize, the New Delta Review's Editors' Choice Prize, and the 2017 Poetry International Prize.

Wrapping up a 2018-19 Masterworks season that has boasted legendary works by some of the world's most noted composers, the musicians of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra, on April 6 and 7, will turn their collective attention to the Quad Cities themselves in Quad Cities Past & Present, a repertoire featuring the world premiere of a QCSO-commissioned work by Chicago-based composer James M. Stephenson.

Best known as the founder, lead singer/songwriter, and guitarist of punk-rock outfit Against Me!, Laura Jane Grace and her Florida-based band The Devouring Mothers play an April 9 Moeller Nights concert at the East Moline venue The Rust Belt, the artist's 2016 album Shape Shift with Me called “densely packed, vicious, and heartbreaking” by Pitchfork magazine, and Grace herself notable for being one of the first highly visible punk rock musicians to publicly identify as transgender.

Classical composers, iconic characters, and an assemblage of phenomenal dancers and musicians will combine in the latest presentation by the area talents of Ballet Quad Cities and Orchestra Iowa: Peter & the Wolf, Mother Goose, & Other Tales, which will enjoy two March 30 performances at Davenport's Adler Theatre and unite crowds in appreciation of the joys, terrors, and wonders of children's stories and fairytales.