Mary Swander is the Poet Laureate of Iowa, the Artistic Director of Swander Woman Productions, and the Executive Director of AgArts, a non-profit designed to imagine and promote healthy food systems through the arts. She was one of the original Black Earth Institute Fellows and is a BEI board member.
Her latest books include a collection of essays called The Sunny Side from Route 3 Press., and The Girls on the Roof (Turning Point/Word Tech, 2009), a Mississippi River flood narrative in a collection of poetry. She is also currently touring her plays Vang, a drama about recent immigrant farmers and Map of my Kingdom, or Who’s Going to Get the Farm? Swander’s play Farmscape has been performed throughout the U.S.
Swander has published scores of other books, essays, magazine articles and commentaries in such places as: The Nation, National Public Radio, National Gardening Magazine, The New Republic. The New Yorker,The New York Times Magazine, and Poetry. Her numerous awards include an Iowa Author’s Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant for the Literary Arts.
She received her M.F.A from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She is a professor of English and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences Emerita at Iowa State University.