Award-winning Author to Give Reading Jan. 28

ST. MARY’S CITY, Md. (Jan. 23, 2010) — Author Debra Marquart, English professor at Iowa State University, will read from her works as part of the St. Mary’s College of Maryland VOICES Reading Series at 8:15 p.m. Thursday, January 28, 2010, at the Daugherty-Palmer Commons. Marquart, who received the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award, is currently working on a novel set in Greece. The event is free and open to the public.

Debra MarquartMarquart has written two poetry collections, Everything’s a Verb and From Sweetness; a short story collection which draws on her experiences as a road musician, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories; and a memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, which received the PEN USA award. PEN Center USA’s annual awards program, established in 1982, recognizes literary excellence. Past award winners include Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston, T.C. Boyle and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Marquart’s work has also received a Pushcart Prize, the Shelby Foote Nonfiction Prize from the Faulkner Society, the Elle Lettres Award from Elle magazine, and a National Endowment for the Arts Prose Fellowship. She also is a member of The Bone People, a jazz-poetry, rhythm & blue project, with whom she has released two CDs: Orange Parade and A Regular Dervish.