A woman with blond hair and a black patterned sweater sits in front of bookshelves.
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Alison Gowans
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CEDAR RAPIDS – The Cedar Rapids Public Library invites the public to a free morning of poetry, storytelling, and songs with Iowa Poet Laureate Debra Marquart. 

Marquart will read from her recent book, “The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging,” and from her forthcoming poetry collection, “Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars." 

The program, “Poetry, Music and the Environment,” will be Saturday, Feb. 25, 10:30-11:30 am at the Downtown Library. This program is funded by Humanities Iowa and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Marquart is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University and Iowa’s Poet Laureate. She is the Senior Editor of “Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment.” In 2021, Marquart was awarded a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. 

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 Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award. Marquart teaches in Iowa State University’s interdisciplinary MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment and in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. 

A memoirist, poet, and performing musician, Marquart is the author of seven books including an environmental memoir of place, “The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere” and a collection of poems, “Small Buried Things: Poems.” Marquart’s short story collection, “The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories” drew on her experiences as a former road musician. A singer/songwriter, she continues to perform solo and with her jazz-poetry performance project, The Bone People, with whom she has recorded two albums. 

Marquart’s most recent book, “The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging,” was published in 2021, and her poetry collection, “Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems” is forthcoming in 2023. For more information about Marquart, visit debramarquart.com. 

A books cover reads "The Night We Landed on the Moon" with an image of a floating woman in a red dress.
A book cover reads "Small Buried Things: Poems" with an image of a shovel sticking out of red ground.
A book cover has text over a stormy sky and field of hay.