Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich (1954 - ) is a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, memoirist, and young adult-and-children’s book writer. She is also a bookseller in the retail sense, the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I remember reading short stories by her in Atlantic Monthly in the late 70s, confident and powerful stories, exotic for being set in contemporary Chippewa communities in the upper Midwest. Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Nation, matrilineally descended. She was Dartmouth ‘76, the first class of women at the college. A writer since childhood, she arrived on the American literary scene practiced and graceful and eloquent — and has only fulfilled and transcended the promise of those early stories, which became the novel Love Medicine (1984).

The novel before The Sentence (2021), The Night Watchman (2020), won the Pulitzer Prize.