Thursday with Marquart

The Poetry Festival at USD was a real showcase for writers of all types. Neil Harrison from Nebraska led a morning workshop and the afternoon featured Debra Marquart, a performance poet and writer from Iowa via North Dakota. Her workshop was excellent and led to a number of poems read at the slam, and her reading in the afternoon was funny and moving, as was her short reading before the slam that night. Four DSU students went down, and three DSU faculty attended the slam, which had one DSU alum reading and a student judging. It was a good showing for us, and we're working now to get Marquart here for a reading and some events.
She read a bit of her memoir The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, which sounds like a good read.