Comments from Little Village publishers and editors, former and current, were compiled by editor-in-chief Emma McClatchey and edited for length and clarity.
2001
Icon publishes its last issue on Jan. 25. Five months later, former staffer Todd Kimm begins publishing Little Village along with Icon alumni Beth Oxler, Andria Green and Steve Horowitz.
How did Little Village get its name?
What’s in a name? In Little Village’s case, a little bit of chaos sparked decades before its first issue appeared around Iowa City in July 2001.
Sonny Boy Williamson II was born in 1912 (or possibly 1897) in Greenwood, Mississippi (or possibly Money, Mississippi). As a baby, he was known as Alex (or possibly Aleck) Ford. Growing up, he was called Rice Miller. When he started his musical career in the 1930s, playing for tips in places around the Mississippi Delta, he performed as Little Boy Blue. Then in 1941, he got his big break when he was booked on the King Biscuit Time radio show on station KFFA in Helena, Arkansas. That’s when he became Sonny Boy Williamson.
Exactly what happened is a little unclear, but it seems Interstate Grocery Co., which manufactured King Biscuit baking flour and sponsored the radio show, was looking for a way to boost sales of its Sonny Boy brand cornmeal to Black communities around Arkansas and the Delta. The company probably felt sure the name “Sonny Boy Williamson” would get people’s attention. That’s because there was already a famous blues musician named Sonny Boy Williamson.
The actual Williamson lived in Chicago at the time, so perhaps Interstate Grocery didn’t think he’d notice. He did, and reportedly confronted the newer Williamson. After that, Clark/Miller/Little Boy Blue/Williamson became Sonny Boy Williamson II, as a way to indicate he wasn’t the original. That remained his name until he died in 1965.
Skip forward to Iowa City in the 1990s, where there’s an excellent publication in the alt-weekly tradition called Icon. In the late ’90s, a publishing company based in Indianapolis, Yesse! Communication, Inc. bought an 80 percent interest in Icon. The company had been buying alt-weeklies around the Midwest, as part of its master-plan to create a giant advertising network. The plan failed quickly, and Yesse! began shuttering the papers it had bought. The lights went out at Icon at the beginning of 2001. But members of its staff weren’t going to be stopped by a corporate decision in Indianapolis.
Matt Steele, who started working at Little Village as a volunteer in 2002 while he was a student at UI, explained what happened next, and how LV got its name, in a 2017 interview:
Beth Oxler was the art director with Icon, and she was a part of the relaunch with Little Village, and they were over at Beth’s house trying to figure out what they’re going to call this thing. And there’s a Sonny Boy Williamson song that’s pretty funny; it’s called “Little Village,” and Beth’s husband, an Iowa City blues musician, Dave Zollo, was sort of razing them from the other room and he’s like, “you should call it Little Village, motherfucker!” And that was almost a direct quote from this Sonny Boy Williamson song, and it stuck.
It did stick. But “Little Village, motherfucker!” isn’t from the song, although it is from the 1957 recording session where Williamson II performed “Little Village.”
After producer Leonard Chess started taping, he asked Williamson, “What’s the name of this?” A clearly annoyed Williamson replied, “‘Little Village.’ ‘A Little Village,’ motherfucker! ‘A Little Village!’”
A more-or-less good-natured argument followed.
Chess: There isn’t a motherfucking thing there about a village, you son of a bitch! Nothing in the song has got anything to do with a village.
Williamson: Well, a small town.
Chess: I know what a village is!
Williamson: Well alright, goddamn it! You know, you don’t need no title. You name it up, you. I got to get through with it, son of a bitch. You name it what you wanna. You name it your mammy, if you wanna.
After that, the music starts. Chess left the exchange — motherfuckers and all — in the final version of the recording, which helped “Little Village” achieve a certain legendary status among blues records.
Fortunately, for us, Dave Zollo decided to yell “Little Village, motherfucker!” that night in 2001, and not “You name it your mammy, if you wanna.”
—Paul Brennan, LV news director
Todd Kimm: I remember carrying a box of layouts into a small-town printer in Marengo, Iowa, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. There was a television at the front counter. On the screen, one of the Twin Towers had smoke trailing from it — a thin, dark ribbon against the Manhattan sky.
Only one other person was in the room, standing there watching. It was Brian Fleck, publisher of a small chain of community newspapers near Iowa City — the man who’d given me my first job out of college. He didn’t know exactly what was happening yet. It didn’t look good, he said. Everyone knows what came next.
In the box I was carrying was the fourth issue of Little Village. Inside its pages: a story about the closing of Pearson’s Drug Store, and a letter to the editor grieving that loss — the slow erosion of small businesses under the weight of corporate consolidation. A cover story about the local house music scene. A notice that Kurt Vonnegut, still alive, was coming to read at the University of Iowa.
A small magazine about a small city, full of the texture of ordinary life.
After I left the printer, I went to teach my first Composition class at Kirkwood Community College. We didn’t do much composing. In front of another television we sat together — strangers — and watched the towers burn and fall.
Little Village was up and running that morning… but still a new thing arriving in the world on a day when everything felt like it was coming apart.
We started Little Village in 2001 because we thought Iowa City deserved a mirror that showed itself its own brilliance and weirdness, its own progressively political and cultural depth. We weren’t trying to change anything. Iowa City and the Corridor were far from perfect, but it was pretty much already all there: the wonderful artists and musicians; the brilliant activists and loveable cranks; the Mills, CSPSs and Cottages; the coffee shops, tattoo parlors and the bigger institutions that were, and still are, really knock-ons from what was happening down on the street, at grass level. And yeah, back then the “underground” wasn’t just abandoned beer caves.
Looking at it all now as one thing or arc, it seems both completely improbable and utterly inevitable. None of it was accidental, but none of it could have been planned the way it actually unfolded either. That’s the strange alchemy of building something with the right people, in the right place, at the right time: you make choices and take risks, and then serendipity keeps handing you the collaborators and the moments that make those choices and risks pay off.
2005
LV’s first publisher, Todd Kimm, hands the magazine off to publisher Alissa Van Winkle (now Hansen) and editor Melody Dworak.
Alissa Hansen: I was straight out of journalism school, and I was a research assistant at the University of Iowa’s Biological Sciences Department by day, and waitressing at the Hamburg Inn by night. I was freelancing for the Press-Citizen and a music review site called Stanky Groove — true story. Somehow Todd and I had crossed paths. I was interested in freelancing for Little Village, and he was like, “Hey, you have a journalism degree. Do you want to edit the magazine?”
We were there to document the hyper-local shifts that defined our town. In my very first issue as editor, I brought in my friend and writer Brendan Spengler to cover the closing of the Green Room, a moment that truly felt like the end of an era (before the next venue came and went in its place). That same issue featured the beloved, eclectic Hall Mall on East College Street.
I was surrounded by giants. We had the legendary Dr. Star handling our horoscopes, and I got to work alongside unforgettable local talents like the late, great chef Kurt Michael Friese, E.C. Fish, UR Here columnist Thomas Dean and Prairie Pop columnist Kembrew McLeod. Later, Paul Ingram of Prairie Lights joined our pages to contribute book reviews.
When Todd offered to sell us the magazine, I know I talked it over with Melody quite a bit. We wanted to celebrate all that we could about what makes us love Iowa City. There was just a really fabulous music scene, all the artists, all the independents — it was thriving, and we wanted to tell those stories. I have a fond memory of my North Dodge house, Melody and I drinking wine and trying to come up with headlines for different stories.
Melody Dworak: I was here living in Iowa City in 2001. I just remember picking it up and being happy that Iowa City had an alternative magazine and it made me want to stay around. I’m from Omaha, and we had the Omaha Reader. It has since shut down, but I always thought a town wasn’t a real town until it had an alternative magazine.
I know when I got involved, I had done one freelance article. I was roommates with a stripper and she was like, “Hey, come down and write a piece.” I met Todd Kimm that way, just exchanging emails, and at one point he was like, “Hey, do you want a magazine?” and I was like, “Nope.” But after talking with Alissa, it was clear that we would make a good team. There’s no way I’d want to publish a magazine on my own, but working with someone made it a successful, unpaid-for-now venture.
I really loved editing stories, working with the writers, making sure the content met a certain standard, as well as coaching them how to just be a better writer. My favorite stories to get published were the ones from new writers with great tales to tell, but nobody gave them a chance. So here’s this chance. You polish it and mold it, and let the community read it and make their own judgment on it.
Alissa Hansen: When I became publisher in early 2006, the stakes felt higher, and the stories grew deeper. I will always be proud of our features on the local jukebox scene and our hard-hitting news coverage of Newport Township residents fighting the Johnson County Board of Supervisors to preserve their land from North Corridor development.
The May/June 2006 issue was a heavy, vital piece of print. We documented the aftermath of the devastating tornado that ravaged our community, profiled the inspiring activism of Thai Flavors owner Cherry Nurak, and pushed boundaries with “Glitter Skank,” a controversial photo essay exploring female sexuality. That last one actually got us pulled from a few local establishments! But that was the job. Little Village was there to hold a candle to the community.
We celebrated local poets, traveled to Fairfield to cover David Lynch weekend at the Maharishi School of Management, profiled a woman’s transitional journey from male to female, and documented the close of Sam Goody and the very first Mission Creek Festival.
By 2007, I had become our sole advertising person, and my fiercest goal was to finally start paying our brilliant contributors. To build up our baseline contributor fund, we threw a massive fundraising concert at Gabe’s. It was an absolute blast. William Elliott Whitmore headlined alongside ft (the Shadow Government) and Skin Club, while local artists sold their work. We raised the capital to expand our circulation and footprint.
I stepped back from publishing after the September 2006 issue, which fittingly covered the closing of Gabe’s and its transition to the Picador, so I could return to school for my Master’s degree to teach English and journalism.
I sold the magazine [to Kevin Koppes, and it briefly folded]. In 2008, Andrew resurrected it, and I returned as editor-in-chief along with Melody as features editor. Together, we ushered in a more sophisticated look, retained our foundational advertisers and brought on an influx of eager new creatives.
2008
After a six-month hiatus, former designer Andrew Sherburne heads a revival of the magazine.
Melody Dworak: I remember I was ecstatic when we did the issue celebrating the marriage equality decision back in 2009. I really love the Iowa Pride timeline that Andrew Sherburne created. It made me feel incredibly proud to live in Iowa at that time. The couple on the cover of that issue [Darrell Taylor and Mark McCusker] are lovely people who have been in the eastern Iowa art scene for decades.
Andrew Sherburne: I moved to town in 2004 from Minneapolis, and I think the first Little Village that I picked up was about the extension of Newport Road and the Wooden Nickel. I opened the front page, and the inside cover was like, “Graphic designer wanted.” I just moved here and I’m unemployed, and I know how to do graphic design, so I sent in my portfolio. A week after I picked up my first Little Village, I had the job designing the next issue.
My tenure as Little Village publisher included putting out the first issue of the newly reborn magazine in June of 2008, and then losing my house to the flood days later. It was overwhelming to think of putting out the next issue when I was still trying to figure out where to live or how to get groceries. But it also felt essential. If we could keep the magazine on schedule, it was proof that life could carry on. And we did it, without missing an issue.
Fast-forward one year and I felt like Little Village — and the Iowa City community — had carried me through. I wanted to honor that with a photo essay of my former neighbors to find out what they carried away from the flood as talismans for moving forward. That July 2009 issue helped me close a chapter with deep appreciation for the people and spirit of Iowa City.
When I was publishing Little Village, it felt like a glorified hobby. It was a self-selecting group of people that wanted to advertise, and I didn’t worry too much about it. Most people are like, “I’m glad this exists. Sign me up.” I remember thinking it was important that we keep publishing. We just brought this thing back, we can’t let it die again. As long as the bills got covered and we had a little bit to pay contributors, I wasn’t trying to make any money on it.
On the day it was done at the printer, I would drive to Marengo in my Honda Civic with shitty suspension, and I’d put 6,000 issues in that thing, every single seat, front passenger seat, back seat, trunk, it was just full. Riding solo, I would have to deliver it on my way back, because I had to get rid of them all that day — I didn’t have a garage to put things in. It was always so fun to pick one up and actually look through it, right in that moment at the printer. Then I’d get in the car, and it would just smell like ink, that fresh print smell. It was fun.
My favorite memory that epitomizes the early days and foreshadows the radical evolution of Little Village into an actual business are my purchase and sale of the magazine. In 2008, our team met up with Kevin Koppes, who deeply wanted the magazine to be reborn and was happy to hand it off with no strings attached. But I’d read a blog post or something about sales being more legally sound if there was an exchange. We agreed on $5. A media empire for a fiver! When I was ready to pass the torch, I jokingly asked Matt for $10 so I could say I doubled my money. He agreed!
Those handoffs were in the true spirit of Little Village. This was a community asset first and foremost that needed to persist. Thankfully, now, it’s a legitimate operation, and presumably one worth a few extra zeroes. But at its heart, I have to imagine, there’s that sense that we’ve all just been caretakers of something that belongs to the people.
2010
Matthew Steele takes over publishing duties, expands the Little Village website and begins publishing longer issues. LV’s distribution and coverage area expands to include the Quad Cities, Cedar Falls/Waterloo and Fairfield. In 2014, LV joins the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN).
Matt Steele: Having staff there full time, that was a huge game-changer. When you start paying people, they start working — funny, how that works. But when there started to be payroll, those phone calls to advertisers started to hit a little different. As publisher, I was scared most of the time. It was just sheer terror; that was my primary emotion.
I think it got easier as our staff grew, as we had really skilled people in specific positions. If someone wanted to make a comment on a political issue or some kind of news tip, I had the luxury that most of the publishers before didn’t — I can say, OK, email Paul Brennan, or one of the other editors. I think I learned this really from Melody; that firewall between the ads and the editorial was something that she really cared a lot about, and was one of the first goals of hiring an editor. I was no longer publisher and managing editor.
This was a period that saw massive decline in public trust in the media, and one of Little Village’s strengths was that we were explicit about our mission. Readers generally knew where we were coming from and what values informed our coverage. That didn’t mean everyone agreed with us, but it gave people a framework for understanding our work.
Also of note in this time period was the pandemic, which was, of course, hell. Our government didn’t give a shit and I can still hear the helicopters flying in and out of the UI hospital, nonstop. By the time it was “over,” the closeness of the relationship between Des Moines and Iowa City had become all too obvious.
2022
Little Village expands to the Des Moines metro and Ames. A Dubuque route is added soon after.
Todd Kimm: The expansions read like a strategy because they were one: into Des Moines and Ames in 2022, reaching central Iowa’s artists and musicians and independent business owners who’d been feeling culturally stranded; into Dubuque in 2024, stepping into the space a retreating legacy press had abandoned. But strategy is the easy part to describe after the fact. What’s harder to explain is how each move kept surfacing more people who already believed in this kind of journalism and just needed a structure to plug into. Twenty-thousand copies a month now, free, across more than 800 locations from the Quad Cities to Waterloo and Cedar Falls and the rural networks between them. Still ad-supported. Still independent.
2025
Jordan Sellegren buys Little Village from Matt Steele, taking over as publisher. Distribution expands further to include Muscatine, Grinnell, Marshalltown and other communities.
Jordan Sellergren: I didn’t mean to buy the magazine, but one night in August 2024 after being on staff for a decade, Matt came over to drop off some stereo equipment he was getting rid of. We had a cocktail on the porch and started arguing about business. He offered to sell (“Why don’t you just buy it then?”) and I believe I told him to fuck off. Later that night I told him I’d sleep on it. I woke up the next morning and told him yes.
I was born and raised in Iowa and moved back in 2010 after a decade away to witness the beginning of a major cultural and political shift. I’d always understood Iowa to be progressive — at least on a Midwestern scale — and the shift was unsettling. In 2012 or so, Matt approached me to sell ads on commission. My first attempt at a sale was Romantix Adult Boutique, but I failed completely. Matt brought me on as a freelance designer anyway, and eventually I became staff in 2014. I remember staying up with him until 2 in the morning during my first official production night and thinking… nope. This isn’t going to be how it works. We need a predictable work week.
Over the next few years, we really got our production schedule down to a science, especially after Genevieve Trainor, Emma McClatchey and Paul Brennan came on board. We had a good collaborative flow, bringing very different strengths to the magazine but with a shared vision of doing good while also causing a bit of trouble. That era is when Little Village became less of a job and sort of seeped into my bones.
When I officially took ownership at the beginning of 2025, one of my first sales was a full-page Romantix ad that ran next to Dear Kiki (the advice column we launched in 2015) in the February issue. I had handed over my design and production responsibilities. Now I get to sit in the back room, losing my mind over revenue and expenses while I eavesdrop on Kellan, Chuy, Emma and Paul brainstorming the next few weeks or months of stories. Occasionally I’ll stick my head in with an idea, but like Matt mentioned, the division of sales and editorial is crucial to the integrity of any newsroom — so I’m happy to stay out of it.
Since we’ve expanded over the years, we’ve gotten some flack about no longer being a niche Iowa City-focused publication. I’ve certainly wrestled with that, but to me, the big picture is more important. The goal is to expand our distribution into as many towns in Iowa as possible, giving as many readers as we can something to hold onto — literally a print magazine that pushes boundaries, opens minds and stands up for the rights of Iowans. Plus, free sex and love advice.
Alissa Hansen: It is a profound and beautiful thing to flip through the archives and realize you helped shape a piece of living history. Looking at Little Village today, thriving in its 25th year, I am filled with incredible pride for how much it has grown, and I am deeply grateful for the wild, beautiful, and sometimes scandalous years I spent at the helm.
In all honesty, what I see you doing now is exactly what I had hoped for. You’re not afraid to tackle what some won’t, and it really does come back to that integrity part. We all believed in the power of alternative journalism, and look at what it’s become. Now LV is in the Des Moines metro area, and I teach journalism, and my students know about Little Village, so they will send me pictures every time they see it out. My in-laws are in the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area, and it’s there. It is just such a beautiful thing to see. I think we all had a part in something really special.
Andrew Sherburne: Among other things, FilmScene wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t been the photographer that took pictures for a piece on the Bijou Cinema remodel where I met Andy Brodie and Emily Light. Andy was also briefly an arts calendar editor for LV. Those conversations about cinematic dreams for this town were the bond that led to co-founding FilmScene. In a full-circle moment, LV published the first ink about our founding.
I think it’s interesting that 25 years ago, when Little Village started, it was truly an alternative print media. There were big newspapers in this town with dozens of employees. And now I feel like Little Village is the most reliable, well-resourced journalism around. It’s the primary source of coverage in a lot of ways for a lot of parts of this community. I think it’s only grown in importance.
Matt Steele: I haven’t been out for that long, but I really hope to see it continue in print as a print format magazine, and expand to more small towns around the state where people do not see people that look and feel and act like they feel and look and act. That I think is an experience that so many people had when they finally went to Iowa City for the first time: they had friends, they were able to say their interests out loud and not get laughed at. I think that, aside from terror, was the main driver for me. If I ever needed to tap into something deep to keep going, that was it.
Todd Kimm: We’ve all watched Iowa change in genuinely unsettling ways. This was a state that helped put Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama in office. It was a state that ranked near the top in education. Now it elects some of the most recklessly conservative figures in the country, and its schools have slid toward the bottom of national rankings. That’s not abstract to me. That’s the place Little Village was born in, changing underneath us.
No, Little Village isn’t going to save Iowa. I don’t think any single publication can. But what it can do, what it’s actually doing, is something quieter and maybe more durable: it can help aggregate a vision, and gather the people who are willing to carry that vision forward. That’s what local journalism does at its best. It doesn’t hand anyone a solution. It just makes sure the people who care about a place can still find each other.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s July 2026 issue.
