peoplepill id: debra-marquart
DM
United States of America
1 views today
1 views this week
Debra Marquart
American poet and musician

Debra Marquart

The basics

Quick Facts

Intro
American poet and musician
Work field
Gender
Female
Birth
Place of birth
Napoleon, Logan County, North Dakota, USA
Age
69 years
The details (from wikipedia)

Biography

Debra Marquart is an American poet and musician from the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. Since 1992 she has been performing as singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People. After graduating with master's degrees from Moorhead State University and Iowa State University (ISU), she became an English professor at ISU, directing an MFA program in "creative writing and environment". In 2014, she taught writers' workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by hydraulic fracking, where "many people ... are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone."

Early life

Marquart grew up on a farm originally purchased by her great-grandfather in the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. She was the youngest of five children. Though her father relocated the family to Bismarck at one point, none of his brothers was willing to run the farm, so they returned. Marquart loathed the place, the hard physical labor, and the limited prospects for women, and was eager to leave.

Career

After finishing high school, she toured with rock and heavy metal bands throughout the 1980s. At the end of the decade she studied at Moorhead State University, Minnesota, graduating with a Master of Liberal Arts in 1990. In 1991 she moved to Iowa, enrolling at Iowa State University (ISU) in Ames and earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1993 with a thesis entitled "The Horizontal Life: Poems, Stories, Essays". She became an English professor at ISU and has been directing the MFA program in 'creative writing and environment'.

In November 2013, the North Dakota Humanities Council invited her to a "traveling residency to gather cultural and environmental impact stories in the North Dakota Oil Patch". She taught writers' workshops in Bakken communities most affected by hydraulic fracking.

She has developed concerns about the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, the 3900 oil spills in North Dakota since the oil boom, and water quality. She is also concerned about the ICBMs still planted in the fracking zone. In a 2016 Iowa Public Radio interview, she read the poem "Lament" from "Small buried things". She has said:

There are some good things about the oil boom, but we must realize that many people in the state are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone and the rest of the country doesn't care what their land and water will be like.I love the place, so I must speak up for it.

Work

She has published six books, which includes three poetry collections, a book of short stories, and a memoir.

She has edited several other books including the 2016 anthology Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence.

She is a singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People, a jazz-poetry rhythm & blues project with Anthony Stevens and Peter Manesis, and released the CDs Orange Parade (acoustic rock) and A Regular Dervish (jazz-poetry).

Awards

She has received the following awards:

  • John Guyon Nonfiction Award
  • 2001 Pushcart Prize
  • 2003 Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award
  • The Headwater's Prize
  • 2003 Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society
  • 2007 PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award
  • 2008 NEA Creative Writing Prose Fellowship
  • 2014 Paumanok Poetry Award from the Visiting Writers Program, Farmingdale State College, New York.
The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
Lists
Debra Marquart is in following lists
comments so far.
Comments
From our partners
Sponsored
Credits
References and sources
Debra Marquart
arrow-left arrow-right instagram whatsapp myspace quora soundcloud spotify tumblr vk website youtube pandora tunein iheart itunes