Cocktails & Convos with Debra Marquart
Date: Wednesday, February 21 Time: 7 PM Location: Dog-Eared Books Main Floor
Gratitude with Dogs under Stars features Debra Marquart’s three collections of lyric poetry and adds twenty-one new poems to round out the experience. Beginning with the collection of new poems, the collection travels backward through Marquart’s illustrious career. Long-time fans and newcomers alike can track the trajectory of this Poet Laureate’s poetic life thus far―the quiet serenity of walking dogs under a starry sky, the horrors of fracking, the beginnings of a tender relationship at a firing range, reflecting on the follies of a youthful life lived carefree. Marquart’s imagery is vivid and concise, painting moments so intrinsically midwestern and so alive they could only be hers.
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. The Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa, Marquart 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 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).