Debra Marquart | |
---|---|
Born | 1956 [1] : 30 Napoleon, North Dakota |
Occupation | Poet, singer-songwriter |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Education | Master of Liberal Arts, Moorhead State University (1990) M.A. Creative Writing, Iowa State University (1993) |
Website | |
debramarquart |
Debra Marquart is an American poet and musician from the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. Since 1992 she has been performing as singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People. After graduating with master's degrees from Moorhead State University and Iowa State University (ISU), she became an English professor at ISU, directing an MFA program in "creative writing and environment". In 2014, she taught writers' workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by hydraulic fracking, [2] where "many people ... are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone." [3] She is the Poet Laureate of Iowa since 2019. [4] In 2021 she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. [4]
Marquart grew up on a farm originally purchased by her great-grandfather in the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. [3] [5] She was the youngest of five children. [5] Though her father relocated the family to Bismarck at one point, none of his brothers was willing to run the farm, so they returned. [5] Marquart loathed the place, the hard physical labor, and the limited prospects for women, and was eager to leave. [6]
After finishing high school, she toured with rock and heavy metal bands throughout the 1980s. [6] At the end of the decade she studied at Moorhead State University, Minnesota, graduating with a Master of Liberal Arts in 1990. In 1991 she moved to Iowa, [3] enrolling at Iowa State University (ISU) in Ames and earned a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1993 with a thesis entitled "The Horizontal Life: Poems, Stories, Essays". She became an English professor at ISU and has been directing the MFA program in 'creative writing and environment'. [7]
In November 2013, the North Dakota Humanities Council invited her to a "traveling residency to gather cultural and environmental impact stories in the North Dakota Oil Patch". She taught writers' workshops in Bakken communities most affected by hydraulic fracking. [2]
She has developed concerns about the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, the 3900 oil spills in North Dakota since the oil boom, and water quality. She is also concerned about the ICBMs still planted in the fracking zone. In a 2016 Iowa Public Radio interview, she read the poem "Lament" from "Small buried things". She has said:
There are some good things about the oil boom, but we must realize that many people in the state are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone and the rest of the country doesn't care what their land and water will be like. I love the place, so I must speak up for it. [3]
She has published six books, which includes three poetry collections, a book of short stories, and a memoir. [8]
She has edited several other books including the 2016 anthology Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence. [9]
She is a singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People, a jazz-poetry rhythm & blues project with Anthony Stevens and Peter Manesis, [8] and released the CDs Orange Parade (acoustic rock) and A Regular Dervish (jazz-poetry). [6]
She has received the following awards: [10]
Ames is a city in Story County, Iowa, United States, located approximately 30 miles (48 km) north of Des Moines in central Iowa. It is best known as the home of Iowa State University (ISU), with leading agriculture, design, engineering, and veterinary medicine colleges. A United States Department of Energy national laboratory, Ames Laboratory, is located on the ISU campus.
Theodore J. Kooser is an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2005. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Kooser was one of the first poets laureate selected from the Great Plains, and is known for his conversational style of poetry.
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Great Balls of Fire, Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.
Thomas Matthew McGrath, was a celebrated American poet and screenwriter of documentary films.
The culture of Minnesota is a subculture of the United States with influences from Scandinavian Americans, Finnish Americans, Irish Americans, German Americans, Native Americans, Czechoslovak Americans, among numerous other immigrant groups. They work in the context of the cold agricultural and mining state.
The Bakken Formation is a rock unit from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying about 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, underlying parts of Montana, North Dakota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The formation was initially described by geologist J. W. Nordquist in 1953. The formation is entirely in the subsurface, and has no surface outcrop. It is named after Henry O. Bakken (1901–1982), a farmer in Tioga, North Dakota, who owned the land where the formation was initially discovered while drilling for oil.
Gasland is a 2010 American documentary film written and directed by Josh Fox. It focuses on communities in the United States where natural gas drilling activity was a concern and, specifically, on hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), a method of stimulating production in otherwise impermeable rock. The film was a key mobilizer for the anti-fracking movement, and "brought the term 'hydraulic fracturing' into the nation's living rooms" according to The New York Times.
Harold Glenn Hamm is an American entrepreneur in the oil and gas business. He is known for extracting shale oil resources. As of February 4, 2022, Hamm's net worth is estimated to be US$49.3 billion, making him the 63rd wealthiest person in the world. He is the founder and chairman of Continental Resources In 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney named Hamm as his energy advisor, and Hamm donated to and advised Romney's election effort.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is an American poet, writer and professor, honored as the third Kansas Poet Laureate (2009–2012). A professor at Goddard College, a private, liberal arts college in Plainfield, Vermont, she serves as the coordinator for the Transformative Language Arts track, which she initiated. Enriching people across the United States, Mirriam-Goldberg uses workshops, retreats, and readings to broaden different communities' ideals about spoken, written, and sung word.
Fracking is a well stimulation technique involving the fracturing of bedrock formations by a pressurized liquid. The process involves the high-pressure injection of "fracking fluid" into a wellbore to create cracks in the deep-rock formations through which natural gas, petroleum, and brine will flow more freely. When the hydraulic pressure is removed from the well, small grains of hydraulic fracturing proppants hold the fractures open.
Continental Resources, Inc. is a petroleum and natural gas exploration and production company headquartered in Oklahoma City. The company was founded by Harold Hamm in 1967 at the age of 21 as Shelly Dean Oil Company, originally named for Hamm's two daughters. In 1990, Shelly Dean re-branded itself as Continental Resources. It primarily used hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling to produce from low permeability formations.
The North Dakota oil boom refers to the period of rapidly expanding oil extraction from the Bakken Formation in the state of North Dakota that lasted from the discovery of Parshall Oil Field in 2006, and peaked in 2012, but with substantially less growth noted since 2015 due to a global decline in oil prices. Despite the Great Recession, the oil boom resulted in enough jobs to provide North Dakota with the lowest unemployment rate in the United States from 2008 to at least 2014. The boom gave North Dakota, a state with a 2013 population of about 725,000, a billion-dollar budget surplus. North Dakota, which ranked 38th in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in 2001, rose steadily with the Bakken boom, and had a per capita GDP 29% above the national average by 2013.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Heid E. Erdrich is a poet, editor, and writer. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
The Canol shale play is the name for a region of Canada's Northwest Territories that is being investigated as a potential source of tight oil . The region centers around the known reserves of conventionally exploitable petroleum at Norman Wells.
Fracking in Canada was first used in Alberta in 1953 to extract hydrocarbons from the giant Pembina oil field, the biggest conventional oil field in Alberta, which would have produced very little oil without fracturing. Since then, over 170,000 oil and gas wells have been fractured in Western Canada. Fracking is a process that stimulates natural gas or oil in wellbores to flow more easily by subjecting hydrocarbon reservoirs to pressure through the injection of fluids or gas at depth causing the rock to fracture or to widen existing cracks.
Gwen Westerman is a Dakota educator, writer and artist. She is the Director of the Native American Literature Symposium. She was appointed by Governor Tim Walz as Minnesota's third Poet Laureate in September 2021.
Katie Hae Leo is a Korean American playwright, poet, essayist and creative nonfiction writer. Her writing has been published in Water~Stone Review, Asian American Poetry & Writing, Kartika Review, 60 Seconds to Shine: One-minute Monologues for Men, MN Women's Press, and Utne Reader. Her stage work includes Four Destinies, first produced by Mu Performing Arts, and N/A, a solo piece the debuted at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia and was remounted at Dreamland Arts in Saint Paul. The themes in her work involve place, identity, and her experience as a transracial Korean adoptee. Her influences include Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, and Kristina Wong.
The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) or Bakken pipeline is a 1,172-mile-long (1,886 km) underground pipeline in the United States that has the ability to transport up to 750,000 barrels of light sweet crude oil per day. It begins in the shale oil fields of the Bakken Formation in northwest North Dakota and continues through South Dakota and Iowa to an oil terminal near Patoka, Illinois. Together with the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline from Patoka to Nederland, Texas, it forms the Bakken system. The pipeline transports 40 percent of the oil produced in the Bakken region.