• January 28, 2008

  ISU's Marquart receives National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
  

• Debra Marquart, professor of English at Iowa State University, has been awarded a $25,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

  Marquart's project was one of 42 selected to be funded out of a pool of around 800 applicants. The 2008 NEA Literature Fellowships recognize writers of prose, encouraging the production of new work by affording these writers the time for writing, research, travel and general career advancement.

  Tentatively titled Somewhere Else This Time Tomorrow: On Geographical Flight and Cultural Amnesia, Marquart is planning to write a travel narrative and roots memoir that "focuses on the complicating effects of immigration in the midst of political upheaval - what gets lost in flight and the rate of those who get left behind."

  Marquart will trace the story of her great-grandfather and his three brothers, each of whom suffered a different fate as the result of the communist revolution and the tumultuous years in Russia during World War II. Marquart's great-grandfather and one brother emigrated to the Dakota Territory prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

  A key point of Marquart's book will look at the two brothers that remained in Russia – one who was killed in a peasant uprising when the men of his village refused to hand grain over to the Soviets during a rationing period – and the other brother who was eventually sent to a forced labor camp in Siberia during World War II.

  "I have been conducting interviews with live subjects, as well as studying archived documents such as letter and journal collections, WPA documents and railroad brochures," Marquart writes.

  Marquart traveled to the Ukraine and Russia in 1998 to begin researching the project and she plans to use the NEA funding to help return to Siberia to find and study the German-Russian villages and meet the descendants of those from her ethnic group who survived forced labor camps during World War II.

  The author of several books, Marquart's latest is a memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere. That book has received positive reviews from many different outlets and won the PEN USA 2007 Creative Nonfiction Award, which recognizes literary excellence in ten categories including creative nonfiction.
  

Debra Marquart

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