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.
