Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is a multiple award-winning author whose writing for adults has been compared to William Faulkner. She is considered one of the most important and noteworthy contemporary Native American authors. Erdrich is the daughter of an Ojibwe (Chippewa) mother and a German-American father. She draws upon both of these cultural inheritances in her writing, particularly a series of related novels and short stories that take place in the lands of North Dakota where members of both sides of her ancestry met and mingled. Her first novel, Love Medicine, was published in 1984 and is made up of a series of interconnected narratives each told from a different North Dakota character's point of view. Set on an Ojibwe Reservation in North Dakota, these narratives tell the story of several families and move about in time, covering the decades between 1930 and 1980. Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984.

Erdrich was a member of the first female class to be admitted to Dartmouth College in 1972. She graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth and then went on to receive an MA in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins. In order to supplement her academic work with what she called more practical pursuits, Erdrich undertook a variety of jobs, including beet weeder, waitress, psychiatric aide, poetry teacher at prisons, lifeguard, and construction flag signaler.

Erdrich's work for children and young adults includes a series of books about a young Ojibwe girl named Omakayas and her family and tribe's daily life in the mid 19th century - as well as their struggles to survive as white settlers increasingly encroach upon the tribal land in the Great Lakes region. The first book, The Birchbark House, was published in 2002 and was followed by The Game of Silence in 2006, which won the Scott O'Dell award for historical fiction. The most recent installment, The Porcupine Year, was released in 2008. Each of the three books is accompanied by Erdrich's pencil illustrations. Erdrich has also written picture books for younger children, including Grandmother's Pigeon and The Range Eternal.

Sources:

• "Louise Erdrich." Contemporary Authors. 18 Feb. 2009. Gale. U Texas at Austin. 30 July 2009 http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/?db=CA.