Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings.
28 Facts About Louise Erdrich
2.
Louise Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
3.
Louise Erdrich has written 28 books in all, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children's books.
4.
Louise Erdrich is a 2013 recipient of the Alex Awards.
5.
Louise Erdrich was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction at the National Book Festival in September 2015.
6.
Louise Erdrich was married to author Michael Dorris and the two collaborated on a number of works.
7.
Louise Erdrich is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities.
8.
Louise Erdrich was born on June 7,1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota.
9.
Louise Erdrich was the oldest of seven children born to Ralph Erdrich, a German-American, and Rita, a Chippewa woman.
10.
Louise Erdrich was raised "with all the accepted truths" of Catholicism.
11.
In 1978, Louise Erdrich enrolled in a Master of Arts program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
12.
Louise Erdrich earned the Master of Arts in the Writing Seminars in 1979.
13.
Louise Erdrich attended one of her poetry readings, became impressed with her work, and developed an interest in working with her.
14.
Dorris and Louise Erdrich separated in 1995, and Dorris died by suicide in 1997.
15.
In 2001, at age 47, Louise Erdrich gave birth to a daughter, Azure, fathered by a Native American man Louise Erdrich declines to identify publicly.
16.
Louise Erdrich discusses her pregnancy with Azure, and Azure's father, in her 2003 non-fiction book, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country.
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Louise Erdrich uses the name "Tobasonakwut" to refer to him.
18.
Louise Erdrich is described as a traditional healer and teacher, who is eighteen years Erdrich's senior and a married man.
19.
Louise Erdrich later turned Love Medicine into a tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace.
20.
Louise Erdrich continues to write poems, which have been included in her collections.
21.
Louise Erdrich is best known as a novelist, and has published a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels.
22.
Louise Erdrich followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen, which continued her technique of using multiple narrators and expanded the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota.
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Louise Erdrich heavily revised the book in 2009 and published the revision as The Antelope Woman in 2016.
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Louise Erdrich subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby towns.
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Louise Erdrich has published five novels since 1998 dealing with events in that fictional area.
26.
In 2009, Louise Erdrich was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Plague of Doves and a National Book Award finalist for The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.
27.
Louise Erdrich writes for younger audiences; she has a children's picture book Grandmother's Pigeon, and her children's book The Birchbark House, was a National Book Award finalist.
28.
Louise Erdrich continued the series with The Game of Silence, winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction; and The Porcupine Year.