Heid E. Erdrich | |
|---|---|
 Heid E. Erdrich at the 2018 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | November 26, 1963 |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, American |
| Education | Dartmouth College (BA) |
| Alma mater | Johns Hopkins University, master's degrees |
| Relatives | Louise Erdrich (sister) |
| Website | |
| heiderdrich | |
Heid E. Erdrich (born November 26, 1963) is a poet, editor, and writer. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
Heid Ellen Erdrich was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, and was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota. [1] She comes from a family of seven siblings including sisters Louise Erdrich (well-known contemporary Native writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction) and Lise Erdrich (also a published writer). Their father Ralph (German-American) and mother Rita (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school [2] for the Turtle Mountain Band. [3] Their maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was the tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe from 1953 to 1959 and fought against Indian termination. [4]
Erdrich graduated from Dartmouth College in 1986 with a B.A. in Literature and Creative Writing. She earned two master's degrees from Johns Hopkins University, one in poetry (1989) and another in fiction (1990). [5] [6] Erdrich holds a PhD in Arts and Sciences in Native American Literature and Writing from Union Institute. [7]
Erdrich has published several volumes of poetry: Fishing for Myth (1997); The Mother's Tongue (2005); National Monuments (2008), which won the Minnesota Book Award; [5] Cell Traffic (2012); and Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (2017), which won the Minnesota Book Award in 2018. [8] She has also written short stories and nonfiction. In 2016, Erdrich's "every-blest-thing-seeing-eye" was named the Winter Book by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. [9] More recently, Erdrich has garnered attention and won awards from Co-Kisser Poetry Festival and Southwestern Association for Indian Artists for her video-poems or poem films—short, collaborative pieces treating contemporary indigenous themes including the Idle No More movement. [10] [11] One of the central collaborators in these video-poems is painter and digital media artist Jonathan Thunder. [12]
Some of her video-poem works include:
In addition to her own writing, Erdrich also promotes the work of other Native American authors. She is a guest editor at the Yellow Medicine Review, a journal devoted to indigenous literature and art; and she co-edited a volume of writing by Native American women with Navajo poet Laura Tohe. Her second anthology, New Poets of Native Nations, featuring Native poets who have published first books since the year 2000, was published by Graywolf Press in 2018. [13] Scholar Scott Andrews reviewed the book stating that "These new poets of Native nations carry their voices into an indigenous future that settler colonialism tried to foreclose and that mainstream publishing too seldom recognizes," and noting that it was the first "substantial anthology of US Native poetry" since 1988. [14]
With her sister Louise, she founded The Birchbark House fund at the Minneapolis Foundation, with the intent of supporting Native writing and Native language revitalization. [5] Erdrich teaches writing in the Augsburg University low-residency MFA Creative Writing program, which is dedicated to advancing the work and careers of aspiring writers. [15] Erdrich also directs Wiigwaas Press, which publishes books in Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), as well as films and other media. [16]
On December 19, 2023, the City of Minneapolis announced that Erdrich was appointed as the city's first poet laureate. [17]
In addition to being a poet, writer, and editor, Erdrich also has curated museum exhibitions in the Twin Cities area and across the nation. She is currently guest curator at Amherst College's Mead Museum. One early exhibition was part of the larger series called "Greening the Riverfront" which is a project aimed at exploring the history and transformation of the Minneapolis Riverfront. Erdrich's curation of this exhibit "fed a broader arterial network of Ojibwe and Indigenous women artists and activists who have worked to make visible the continuing claims of this and other threatened riverine systems " (Bernardin, 2017, pp. 39). [18]
Her honors include a National Poetry Series award, two Minnesota Book Awards and a Native Arts and Cultures National Fellowship. [19]
Erdrich has taught at Johns Hopkins University (1989-1992) and was tenured at the University of St. Thomas where she taught until 2007. Since leaving full-time teaching, Erdrich has taught at Augsburg University in the MFA in writing low-residency program and elsewhere. She was the 2019 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota Morris, the Glasgow Writer-in-Residence for Washington and Lee University in 2021, and the Elliston poet-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati in 2022. Also in 2022, Erdrich taught for a term in NAIS at Dartmouth College. She has also taught workshops for Native writers at Turtle Mountain Community College, along with her sister Louise. [20] [21]
Erdrich directs Wiigwaas Press, an Ojibwe language publisher. She has received two Minnesota Book Awards, as well as fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and others. From 2014 to 2022, she taught in the low-residency MFA creative writing program at Augsburg University. She was the 2019 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota Morris. [22]
Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Paula Gunn Allen was an American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Arab-American, and Native American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo. Gunn Allen wrote numerous essays, stories and poetry with Native American and feminist themes, and two biographies of Native American women. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary writing.
Linda K. Hogan is an American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She previously served as the Chickasaw Nation's writer in residence. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
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Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.
Denise Low is an American poet, honored as the second Kansas poet laureate (2007–2009). A professor at Haskell Indian Nations University, Low taught literature, creative writing and American Indian studies courses at the university. She was succeeded by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg on July 1, 2009.
Elizabeth Woody is an American Navajo/Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama artist, author, and educator. In March 2016, she was the first Native American to be named poet laureate of Oregon by Governor Kate Brown.
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Cheryl Savageau is a writer and poet who self-identifies as being of Abenaki descent.
Margaret A. Noodin (née O’Donnell) is an American poet and Anishinaabemowin language teacher. She is a professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Associate Dean of the Humanities. She also directs a tribal Head Start program in Minnesota.
Suzanne S. Rancourt is a poet and veteran of both the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army as well being an Abenaki and Huron descendant. She was born and raised in west central Maine. She has written a collection of poetry called Billboard in the Clouds, which won the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas First Book Award in 2001, and some of her other work also appears in The Journal of Military Experience, Volume II. Her work has also been published in the literary journals Callaloo and The Cimarron Review, as well as many other anthologies.
Gwen Nell Westerman is a Dakota educator, writer and artist. She is a professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and the Director of the Native American Literature Symposium. She was appointed by Governor Tim Walz as Poet Laureate of Minnesota in September 2021.
Esther Belin is a Diné multimedia artist and writer. She is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as the University of California, Berkeley.
Linda LeGarde Grover is an Anishinaabe novelist and short story writer. An enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, she is a professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, as well as a columnist for the Duluth News Tribune.
Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes from the Upper Midwest is a recipe/collage book written by Heid E. Erdrich, published by the MN Historical Society Press in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Heid E. Sherman is a member of the North Dakota Turtle Mountain Band of the Ojibwe people who is currently based in South Minneapolis. Her cookbook explores native american cuisine and indigenous ingredients, within a globally-aware framework that includes stories, recollections and anecdotes.
Jennifer Elise Foerster is a poet, writer, and teacher. She has published three poetry books and served as Associate Editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020), and has been published in numerous journal publications and anthologies. Her 2013 book Leaving Tulsa was a finalist for the shortlist of the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award.
The Night Watchman is a novel by Louise Erdrich first published on March 3, 2020, by HarperCollins. The novel is set in the 1950s. This is Erdrich's sixth standalone novel following Future Home of the Living God. The novel was inspired by the life of Erdrich's grandfather who motivated and inspired other members of the Turtle Mountain Reservation to resist the Indian termination policies of the 1940s-1960s. The Night Watchman is the first novel that Erdrich has written that is set on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.
dg nanouk okpik is an Inuit poet, specifically Iñupiaq. She received the American Book Award for her debut poetry collection, Corpse Whale (2012). In 2023 she was the recipient of a Windham Campbell Literature Prize for poetry and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
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