A Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University, Debra Marquart teaches in ISU’s interdisciplinary MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment. Marquart served as the Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa from 2019 to 2024. She also teaches in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.
Marquart is the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. A memoirist, poet, and performing musician, Marquart is the author of eight 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.
Marquart’s work has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over 50 grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award. In 2021, Marquart was awarded a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Marquart’s most recent books are The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging (2021) and Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems (2023).
