James A. Autry Award for Poetry & Leadership
This award is given to a person with strong ties to the Iowa poetry community for inspirational leadership in advancing arts and culture, enhancing community enrichment, and ensuring the future of humanities.
About the Award
In 2023 at the inaugural Poetry Palooza, we honored James A. Autry for his inspirational leadership of the poetry community. He played a critical role in founding and carrying on the Des Moines National Poetry Festival, which inspired the founding of Poetry Palooza. We created the James A. Autry Award for Poetry & Leadership to honor those who carry his dedication to poetry in their work. This award consists of a plaque and a gift, which is presented each year during the Poetry Palooza Welcome Reception & Award Ceremony.
Recipients
2026: Ray Young Bear
Ray Young Bear, at 75, is a Meskwaki tribal member. An author of six books, Ray resides with his companion, Stella Lasley-Young Bear, and family on the Meskwaki Settlement. Since 1968, when Ray was a student at South Tama High School, his poetry has been featured in literary magazines and various anthologies. In 2015, Manifestation Wolverine, a four-book collection was published by Open Road Media. In the past year, his work made the pages of the Yellow Medicine Review and the North American Review, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025, Knopf, 2025.
2025: Mary Swander
Mary Swander is an award-winning writer of drama, poetry and nonfiction with a national and international reputation. She has published books with major New York publishing houses as well as university presses. She has won grants and awards from such places as The National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. The former Poet Laureate of Iowa, Swander has published scores of books of poetry and nonfiction as well as essays, magazine articles, individual poems and radio commentaries in such places as National Public Radio, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and Poetry Magazine. She is best known for her poetry book Driving the Body Back and for her memoirs Out of this World and The Desert Pilgrim.
An emerita Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Swander taught creative writing for thirty years at Iowa State University and was a visiting writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Alabama. She now gives workshops on poetry, nonfiction and playwriting, as well as farmland transition, for other colleges and universities and nonprofit organizations. She received her own M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop.
Mary continues to contribute to the writing community through the Iowa Writers Collaborative, writing Mary Swander’s Buggy Land and Swander’s Emerging Voices and podcasting Mary Swander’s Buggy Land. She is the Artistic Director of Swander Woman Productions, a theatre troupe that performs dramas about food, farming, and the wider rural environment. She tours her dramas from coast-to-coast in venues that include farmers’ barns to New York University, The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and The Mayo Clinic. In addition to Squatters on Red Earth, her touring productions are: The Girls on the Roof, an adaptation of her poetry book; Vang, a play about recent immigrant farmers; Map of my Kingdom, a play about farmland transition.
Mary Swander also gives solo performances of her own work, playing the banjo, the harmonica and the spoons. She lives in an old Amish one-room schoolhouse, raises goats and has a large organic garden where she grows most of her own food. Poetry Palooza is thrilled to recognize Mary’s on-going contributions and leadership in the poetry and arts communities with the James Autry Award.
2024: Debra Marquart
Debra Marquart is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, as well as the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine. Marquart served as Iowa’s Poet Laureate until 2024 and the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. The author of seven books—including The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and Small Buried Things: Poems—Marquart has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over 50 grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and Elle Magazine’s Elle Lettres Award.
In 2021, Marquart was awarded a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent books are The Night We Landed on the Moon: Essays Between Exile & Belonging (2021) and a poetry collection, Gratitude with Dogs Under Stars: New & Collected Poems (2023). For more information: debramarquart.com
2023: James A. Autry​
Autry is a former Fortune 500 executive, who is also an author, poet and business coach. He lives in Des Moines, Iowa, with his wife, Sally, and their son, Ronald. Additionally, he has two other sons, Jim and Rick, and two grandsons, Eric and Brian.​
Autry has authored 15 books. His most recent publication is also his first foray into children's literature. Everyday Virtues: Classic Tales to Read with Kids is his first father/son collaboration, co-authored by his son, Rick. Autry's previous publications include books on servant leadership, gratitude, and business poetry (among other topics). ​
Read more about Autry at jamesaautry.com.