The Horizontal World: A Reading

Debra Marquart, an associate professor of English at Iowa State, is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and performance poet. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, was published in 2006. It explores her childhood growing up on a North Dakota farm. In the seventies and eighties, Marquart was a touring road musician with rock and heavy metal bands. Her collection of short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, draws from her experiences as a female road musician. She continues to perform with a jazz-poetry rhythm & 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, and is currently working on a novel set in Greece, titled "The Olive Harvest." Part of the Third Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness & the Creative Imagination.