A prize winning poetry collection, selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2000 Pearl Poetry Prize.
Debra Marquart is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and an affiliated faculty member with the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine. A performance poet, Marquart is the author of two poetry collections: Everything's a Verb (New Rivers Press, 1995) and From Sweetness (Pearl Editions, 2002).
In the 1970s and '80s, Marquart was a touring road musician with rock and heavy metal bands. Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories (New Rivers Press, 2001) draws from her experiences as a female road musician. Marquart continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, with whom she released two CDs: Orange Parade (acoustic rock); and A Regular Dervish (jazz-poetry).
Marquart's work has received a 2008 Prose Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the John Guyon Nonfiction Award (Crab Orchard Review), the Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater's Prize from New Rivers Press, the Minnesota Voices Award, the Pearl Poetry Award (Pearl Editions), the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society.
Marquart's memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere received the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award, the Elle Lettres Award from Elle Magazine, and a New York Times "Editors' Choice" commendation. She is currently at work on three books: a novel set in Greece titled, Among the Ruins; a roots-travel memoir about her family's migrations through Ukraine, Russia and Siberia, titled Somewhere Else This Time Tomorrow: On Geographical Flight & Cultural Amnesia; and a poetry collection, titled, To Break Into Blossom.
