Art is Long, Life is Short: The Writer’s Struggle to Create Something that Lasts

Debra Marquart was a touring road musician with rock and heavy metal bands in the seventies and eighties before her career took an academic turn. She is now a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State. Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone, draws from her experiences on the road. She continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm-and-blues project, The Bone People, with whom she has released two CDs. Marquart is the author of two poetry collections: Everything's a Verb and From Sweetness. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the Elle Lettres Award from Elle Magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She is currently working on a novel set in Greece titled A Formal Feeling Comes. College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean's Lecture Series.