Debra Marquart is a distinguished professor of liberal arts & sciences at Iowa State University. She teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing & environment, serves as the senior editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment and teaches in the Stonecoast low-residency M.F.A. program at the University of Southern Maine. In 2019 Marquart was appointed the poet laureate of Iowa.

Marquart is the author of six books, including three poetry collections—Small Buried Things, Everything’s a Verb, and From Sweetness—and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a female road musician.  Marquart’s environmental memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the “Elle Lettres” award from Elle Magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award.  In 2016 she co-edited an anthology of experimental writing for White Pine Press, Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Prose Sequence.

She has received numerous awards including the John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Creative Writing Prose Fellowship, the 2013 Wachtmeister Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Normal Poetry Prize from The Normal School, and the 2014 Paumanok Poetry Award.   She has two books forthcoming in 2021: an essay collection entitled, The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging (NDSU Press) and a poetry collection, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems (New Rivers Press).