An Evening With Louise Erdrich & Heid E. Erdrich

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won various fellowships and awards including from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and  the Minnesota State Arts Board. She has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid E. Erdrich’s collection of poems, Little Big Bully (Penguin Books) begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled “we”: how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women’s resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. The past for Indigenous people; the ecosystem collapse from near-extinction of bison, and the present epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women underlie these poems. In Erdrich’s voice, survivors shout back. Ms. Magazine praised Erdrich as she “takes on environmental destruction, missing and murdered Indigenous women and more, in her characteristic voice: fierce, witty, personal and political.”

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Based on the extraordinary life of Louise Erdrich’s grandfather, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., The Night Watchman (Harper) is a novel that explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity. In it, Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters —  Thomas Wazhashk night watchman and Chippewa Council member, Patrice Paranteau, factory worker who sets up to look for her missing older sister, and their impoverished reservation community — who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Luis Alberto Urrea, writing for the New York Times Book Review called it “… a magisterial epic that brings [Erdrich’s] power of witness to every page… In this era of modern termination assailing us, the book feels like a call to arms. A call to humanity. A banquet prepared for us by hungry people.”