Debra Marquart is a professor of English and the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. She serves as the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and teaches in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.

Marquart is the author of six books, including three poetry collections—Small Buried Things, Everything's a Verb, and From Sweetness—and a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a female road musician. Marquart’s 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. In 2016, she co-edited a groundbreaking anthology of experimental writing for White Pine Press, Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Prose Sequence.

 Her work has appeared in numerous journals including The North American Review, Three Penny Review, New Letters, River City, Crab Orchard Review, Narrative Magazine, The Sun, The Normal School, River Styx, Orion, and Witness. Marquart's poem "Lament" was recently selected by Edward Hirsch for inclusion in Best American Poetry, 2016.