Who is 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. Her latest book is The Maverick M.D., a biography of Dr. NIcholas Gonzalez.
The Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame recognized Mary Swander recently by naming her as one of the four honorees for 2022. Read more here.
Mary is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Read Mary Swander’s Buggy Land and Swander’s Emerging Voices. She founded Blazing Star Literary Journal. Her podcast is Mary Swander’s Buggy Land.
Mary Swander is the Artistic Director of Swander Woman Productions, a theatre troupe that performs dramas about food, farming, and the wider rural environment. She is also the Executive Director of AgArts, a nonprofit designed to imagine and promote healthy food systems through the arts.
Swander’s productions include Map of My Kingdom, Vang, Farm-to-Fork Tales and Squatters on Red Earth.
Swander’s recent play, Squatters on Red Earth, about the white settler land grab from the Native Americans, is currently touring.
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.
What is Mary Swander’s Buggy Land?
Mary Swander’s Buggy Land is a Substack page that tells the story of two homesteads, one in Iowa in the middle of the Old Order Amish settlement where Swander lives in an old one-room schoolhouse, and the other in Connemara, Ireland, where Swander has dual citizenship.
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