Debra Marquart

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." In 2021 she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Though her father relocated the family to Bismarck at one point, none of his brothers was willing to run the farm, so they returned.

Career After finishing high school, she toured with rock and heavy metal bands throughout the 1980s.

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 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, 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.