Debra Marquart

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Debra Marquart is a professor of English at Iowa State University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine.  Marquart's work has received numerous awards and commendations, including the John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater's Prize, the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society, a Pushcart Prize, and a 2008 NEA Creative Writing Prose Fellowship among others.  Her work has appeared in numerous journals including The North American Review, Three Penny Review, New Letters, River City, Crab Orchard Review, Narrative Magazine, The Sun, Brevity, The Normal School, Orion, and Witness.

Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the "Elle Lettres" award from Elle Magazine, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award.  Marquart is also the author of two poetry collectionsEverything's a Verb and From Sweetnessand a collection of interrelated short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a female road musician.  She has released two CDs with her rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, and continues to perform solo as a singer/songwriter. 

 

Marquart’s latest book, a poetry collection, Small Buried Things, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2015.  She is currently at work on a nonfiction book, “The Listening Room: Notes on a Life in Music,” which is an acoustic ecology, an autobiography of catastrophe, a meditation on the pleasures and privileges of being a singer, and a chronicle of a life filled with making and listening to music.


































             debra marquart - dept. of english - iowa state university

                       (515) 294-3173 - marquart@iastate.edu