Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich (born Karen Louise Erdrich, June 7, 1954) is an American author, writer 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 band of the Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwe and Chippewa). Erdrich is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and also received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. She was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction at the National Book Festival in September, 2015. She was married to author Michael Dorris and the two collaborated on a number of works. She is also 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. 2Early and personal life Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She was the oldest of seven children to her father, Ralph Erdrich, a German-American, and her mother, Rita (née Gourneau), a Chippewa Indian (of half Ojibwe and half French blood