Heid E. Erdrich

Poet Heid E. Erdrich, whose 2020 book, Little Big Bully, is a National Poetry Series Award winner, comes from a talented family that includes oldest sister, novelist Louise Erdrich. Raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, these two of the Erdrich sisters co-founded the Turtle Mountain Writing Workshop and a non-profit indigenous language and literature clearinghouse, related to Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In this 2009 interview, she talks about family, issues of genetics, identity, and her Turtle Mountain Creek Ojibwe heritage, and reads from her first three books,: The Mother’s Tongue, Fishing for Myth and National Monuments, winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. She also won a second time in 2018 for Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. The anthology she edited, New Poets of Native Nations, won the 2019 American Book Award.