College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

All-around writer

Poetry, fiction, non-fiction - all are part of Debra Marquart's repertoire.
Awards for her poetry and short stories are nothing new for Debra Marquart, associate professor of English.

She has received numerous prestigious awards for her work including a 2001 Pushcart Prize for her essay "Things Not Seen in a Rear View Mirror" and a Pulitzer Prize nomination from her publisher, New Rivers Press, in 2001 for her fiction collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories.

Four times in her publishing career, Marquart has won the Dorothy Churchill Cappon essay award sponsored by the respected literary journal New Letters. She has also been the recipient of the Sue Saniel Elkind Poetry award from Kalliope, for her poem "Other Knowledge," and the Guy Owen prize from the Southern Poetry Review, for her poem "Somewhere in a House Where You Are Not."

The Hunger Bone was even recognized before it was published when Marquart was awarded the Capricorn Fiction Award, a prize intended to draw attention to an unpublished fiction manuscript of merit. A year later, the short story collection was awarded the Headwaters Prize from New Rivers Press which included publication of the book in 2001.

That publication also received critical acclaim. The Philadelphia Weekly described the book as "so devoid of histrionics, so sparse and brutally immediate about the dual, destitute and demeaning side of rock" that it makes the "pure and overwhelmingly thankless drive to create heartbreakingly immediate."

Marquart's poetry collection, From Sweetness, was also honored, awarded the 2000 Pearl Poetry Award and published by Pearl Editions in 2002.

And while she has been honored for her teaching at Iowa State with an ISU Foundation Early Achievement in Teaching Award, her creative work hadn't been honored by her on-campus colleagues until last spring when she added another award to her collection. It was then that the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences awarded Marquart its Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research / Creativity Activities.

Many of Marquart's works deal with growing up in rural North Dakota, touring the nation as a rock and roll musician, and her roots as a granddaughter of immigrants.

"Since I was a musician first and a writer second, it's all tone, phrasing, sounds in the broken-down acoustic shapes of phonemes," Marquart says of her writing. "Eventually some sense, some meaning, starts to gather in that collection of sounds, words tack on to other words, then sentences start to form to indicate what will be the narrative.

"Somewhere around there, I start to see what genre I am working with. I know that much of my work has a very powerful narrative impulse: what happened?"

In addition to The Hunger Bone and From Sweetness, Marquart is the author of a second book of poetry; Everything's a Verb. She has published 24 short prose pieces (fiction and nonfiction) and almost 50 poems in over 21 journals. In addition 25 of Marquart's poems, stories and essays have been anthologized.

"I think of myself as a writer, but I started out as a poet," she said.