Bidwell Ghost (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Erdrich was born Karen Louise Erdrich in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954, the eldest of seven children of German-born Ralph Erdrich and Rita Gourneau Erdrich, a Chippewa. Both parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, near the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation, where her maternal grandparents lived. The story-telling traditions of her heritage stimulated her to write her own pieces, an activity encouraged by her parents. In 1972, Erdrich enrolled in Dartmouth College. There she met her future husband and literary collaborator, anthropologist Michael Dorris, who was the chair of the Native American Studies department. While in college, she worked at a wide variety of jobs, including beet weeder, psychiatric aide, lifeguard, waitress, poetry teacher at prisons, and construction flag-signaler. She also became an editor for the Circle, a Boston Indian Council newspaper. She enrolled in a graduate program at Johns Hopkins University in 1978, earning a master’s degree the following year and then returning to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence. During this period, Erdrich began collaborating with Dorris, and one of their stories,“The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” was awarded first prize in Chicago magazine’s Nelson Algren Fiction Competition in 1982. Erdrich subsequently expanded this work into a novel, Love Medicine, which was published in 1984. That same year, she published Jacklight, her first collection of poems. In 1985, Erdrich received the National Book Critics Circle Award and numerous other prizes for Love Medicine. She has continued to write novels, short stories, and poems, publishing a second volume of verse, Baptism of Desire, in 1989.