Debra Marquart is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University and Iowa’s Poet Laureate. She is the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. 

A memoirist, poet, and performing musician, Marquart is the author of six books including an environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and a collection of poems, Small Buried Things: Poems. Marquart’s short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories drew on her experiences as a former road musician.

A singer/songwriter, she continues to perform solo and with her jazz-poetry performance project, The Bone People, with whom she has recorded two CDs.  Her work has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over 50 grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award.

Marquart teaches in Iowa State University’s interdisciplinary MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment and in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.  Her next two books, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems and The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays of Exile & Belonging, are forthcoming in 2021.

Website: www.debramarquart.com

Publications

• The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging , NDSU Press (2021)
• Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems , New Rivers Press (2021)
• Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence , White Pine Press (2016)
• The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere , Counterpoint Books (2007)
• The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories , New Rivers Press (2001)
• Small Buried Things: Poems (forthcoming 2015) , New Rivers Press
• From Sweetness , Pearl Editions (2002)
• Everything's a Verb , New Rivers Press (1996)

Awards

• Poet Laureate, State of Iowa(2019)
• NEA Fellowship
• Pushcart Prize
• PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award(2007)
• 2014 Paumanok Poetry Award from the Visiting Writers Program at Farmingdale State College, New York.(2014)
• 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize, Short-List Honors. Manchester Writing School, Manchester Metropolitan University, Mancheser, UK. (2013)
• Wachtmeister Award for Excellence in the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. (2013)
• David B. Saunders Award for Creative Nonfiction from Cream City Review (2012)

Employment

• Director at MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment, Iowa State University

Genres of Interest

Fiction, Creative nonfiction, Children's literature , Poetry