Archway Reading and Lecture Series to Host Author Debra Marquart

DUBUQUE, Iowa - The Archway Reading and Lecture Series at the University of Dubuque will host a reading and discussion on campus by Debra Marquart, MA, at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 8, 2026, in the Multicultural Student Center, Peter and Susan Smith Welcome Center.

The event is free and open to the public. It will include a question-and-answer session.

Marquart is a distinguished professor of liberal arts and sciences at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Additionally, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State and in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine.

The senior editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, Marquart is the author of eight books including The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, a memoir about growing up a rebellious farmer's daughter on a North Dakota wheat farm, and The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, a collection of short stories as a former road musician.

Marquart's work has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over 50 grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award, a New York Times Editors' Choice commendation, and Elle Magazine's Elle Lettres Award.

A singer-songwriter, Marquart is a member of The Bone People, an unplugged rhythm and blues band with whom she has recorded two CDs - A Regular Dervish and Orange Parade. From 2019 to 2024, Marquart served as the poet laureate for the State of Iowa. In 2021, she was awarded a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.

Marquart is at work on a music memoir about the physical experience of singing, the art of listening, the spectacle of performance, and the ubiquity of music in our lives titled How Fish Learned to Sing: Notes on a Life in Music.

Copies of Marquart's books will be available for purchase.

The Archway Reading and Lecture Series is presented by the Office of Academic Affairs and Department of English at UD.