Debra Marquart

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Poet Laureate of Iowa, 2019-2023

Debra Marquart is a memoirist, poet, and performing musician. She is the author of six books, including a collection of poems, Small Buried Things: Poems (New Rivers Press, 2015), and the environmental memoir The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (Counterpoint, 2006). A singer/songwriter, she continues to perform music solo and with her jazz-poetry performance project, The Bone People, with whom she has recorded two CDs. Marquart is the the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, and 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 newest collection of poetry, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems, is forthcoming in 2021, as well as a collection of essays. She was appointed as the Poet Laureate of Iowa in 2019. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.