Poet and Storyteller Debra Marquart to Speak at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Performance poet, storyteller, memoirist, and rock musician Debra Marquart will read from her writing on Thursday, Nov. 11 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross.  The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public.

Marquart’s writing has been published in various journals, including The North American Review, New Letters, The Sun Magazine, and the Mid-American Review. She is also the author of two poetry collections: Everything’s a verb and From Sweetness.  Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories (New Rivers Press, 2001), is based on her experiences as a female rock musician.  She continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm and blues project, The Bone People.

Her nonfiction, in particular, has received numerous awards, including the Crab Orchard Review’s John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Faulkner Society’s Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay, and a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (Counterpoint Books, 2006) received the “Elle Lettres” award from Elle Magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award.

Marquart is a professor of English at Iowa State University where she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment and at the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.