The scope of the poets in this collection is as broad as the landscape itself, including work by Heid E. Erdrich, Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, Ed Bok Lee, Tim Murphy, and North Dakota's Poet Laureate, Larry Woiwode.
Some are poets descended from indigenous inhabitants of the High Plains. Others are descendants of thos who immigrated here from Germany, Russia, or the Scandinavian countries in the nineteenth century, or more recently from other parts of the country and world. They write about the historical struggles of settlement and assimilation, and more contemporary versions of those struggles in the Bakken oil patch in the western part of the state. Some write about North Dakota from the rural settings they have known and loved for a lifetime, others from the distant vantages of nostalgia or escape, and still others from the point of view of transplants coming to terms with their new home. The poets here include seasoned and emerging voices, women and men, old and young, those from the ranching and oil-flared badlands west of the Missouri, and from the flood-prone river valley farmlands of the east.
The poems in this book ache for home. They ache to be at home. In reflecting those who ache in this great expanse, these poems are about what connects us together as humans, poems that sing to each other across lines and pages and space, demonstrating that, as poet Thomas McGrath asserts in his Letter to an Imaginary Friend, North Dakota is everywhere.

North Dakota is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets

Literature & Fiction

Rhoda Janzen

Aaron Poochigian

Tim Murphy

Robert King

Madelyne Camrud

Debra Marquart

Mark Vinz

Richard, Watson

Ed Bok Lee

Larry Woiwode

Heidi Czerwiec

Heid E. Erdrich

Dale Jacobson

Denise Lajimodiere

Lisa Linrud-Marcis

Jamie Parsley

David R. Solheim

Poetry

North Dakota State University Press

Exploration of the ties between weather and living in place. A wonderful mix of Midwestern authors including new work by Jim Heynen. This is part of the harvest book series.

Prairie Weather

Science & Math

Scott Cawelti

Mary Swander

Jim Heynen

Thomas Dean

Patrick Irelan

Robert Sayre

Amy Kolen

Ron Sandvik

Earth Sciences

Ice Cube Press

The American Midwest provides the ideal landscape for literature exploring the intricate evolution of American ideology and culture from the earliest frontiersmen and settlers to present day citizens. In celebration of this region's inherent importance to American identity, Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland presents a myriad of Midwestern-focused literature in three sections of literary styles: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry with introductions contributed by admired and award-winning Midwestern authors: Dean Bakopoulos, Debra Marquart, and Iowa State Poet Laureate, Mary Swander. With an extensive roster of sixty-eight highly talented writers, this anthology presents an eclectic mix of short stories, flash fiction, lyric essays, autobiographies, and formal and experimental poems that delve into the nuances of Midwestern identity. Each writer herein investigates, challenges, and redefines the varied perceptions of the Midwest, and, most importantly, their literary art invites us to gaze with renewed appreciation on the environmental beauty, nourishing agriculture, and innovative and creative people of the American Heartland.

Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland

Stefanie Brook Trout

Xavier Cavazos

Lance M. Sacknoff

Dean Bakopoulos

United States

Ice Cube Press, LLC

A prize winning poetry collection, selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2000 Pearl Poetry Prize.

From Sweetness

Pearl Editions

Debra Marquart’s newest memoir, an assemblage of essays, explores the space between states of exile and belonging, the seemingly irresolvable dilemma of the restless homebody. Marquart was born into a family of land-loving people―farmers known as the ethnic group Germans-from-Russia―who had emigrated from Russia to the United States between 1886 and 1911 and taken up land claims in Dakota Territory. Her grandparents tended their farms and fields, never dreaming of moving another inch away from the homes they had made. By contrast, Marquart grew up a restless, imaginative child in that same agricultural place, yearning to strike out for places more interesting as soon as she was old enough to take flight. All seemed simple enough until Marquart realized that her family’s stubborn attachment to place grew out of a traumatic multi-generational history of flight, migration, dispossession, and exile from their previous homelands in Europe. Her grandfathers and all her great-grandparents had emigrated to the United States from villages in south Russia, along the Black Sea. And, in a familial pattern going back several more generations, their own great-grandparents had experienced a traumatic uprooting one hundred years earlier when they fled the Rhine region of western Europe on the run from the chaos of the French Revolution. Her more distant ancestors had migrated east along the Danube in 1803 to reach their land claims in south Russia, just as her more immediate ancestors had fled their villages in south Russia to come west to America. As Marquart researched her family history, the revelation about multi-generational patterns of forcible removal from homelands helped her to contextualize her own complicated relationship with ideas of exile and belonging. She realized she came by her restlessness honestly, an American kid weaned on wanderlust and the promise of education calling her to leave home and never return. In The Night We Landed on the Moon, Marquart works out the tensions between divergent impulses―the restlessness in the feet to always move forward into the world, mixed with the opposing desire to turn around, look back, and sometimes even settle in and claim to belong.

The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays between Exile & Belonging

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Gratitude with Dogs under Stars features Debra Marquart's three collections of lyric poetry and adds twenty-one new poems to round out the experience. Beginning with the collection of new poems, the collection travels backwards through Marquart's illustrious career. Long-time fans and newcomers alike can track the trajectory of this Poet Laureate's poetic life thus far-the quiet serenity of walking dogs under a starry sky, the horrors of fracking, the beginnings of a tender relationship at a firing range, reflecting on the follies of a youthful life lived carefree. Marquart's imagery is vivid and concise, painting moments so intrinsically midwestern and so alive they could only be hers.

Gratitude with Dogs under Stars

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Books by Debra Marquart