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.”