Heid E. Erdrich

Career

Erdrich has published several volumes of poetry: Fishing for Myth (1997); The Mother's Tongue (2005); National Monuments (2008), which won the Minnesota Book Award; Cell Traffic (2012); and Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (2017), which won the Minnesota Book Award in 2018. She has also written short stories and nonfiction. In 2016, Erdrich's "every-blest-thing-seeing-eye" was named the Winter Book by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. More recently, Erdrich has garnered attention and won awards from Co-Kisser Poetry Festival and Southwestern Association for Indian Artists for her video-poems or poem films—short, collaborative pieces treating contemporary indigenous themes including the Idle No More movement. One of the central collaborators in these video-poems is painter and digital media artist Jonathan Thunder.

Some of her video-poem works include: Archived 2018-02-26 at the Wayback Machine

• Od'e Miikan-Heart Line (Moose version)
• It Was Cloudy
• Undead Faerie Goes Great with India Pale Ale
• Lexiconography 1
• Pre-Occupied
• Indigenous Elvis Works the Medicine Line

In addition to her own writing, Erdrich also promotes the work of other Native American authors. She is a guest editor at the Yellow Medicine Review, a journal devoted to indigenous literature and art; and she co-edited a volume of writing by Native American women with Navajo poet Laura Tohe. Her second anthology, New Poets of Native Nations, featuring Native poets who have published first books since the year 2000, was published by Graywolf Press in 2018. Scholar Scott Andrews reviewed the book stating that "These new poets of Native nations carry their voices into an indigenous future that settler colonialism tried to foreclose and that mainstream publishing too seldom recognizes," and noting that it was the first "substantial anthology of US Native poetry" since 1988.

With her sister Louise, she founded The Birchbark House fund at the Minneapolis Foundation, with the intent of supporting Native writing and Native language revitalization. Erdrich teaches writing in the Augsburg University low-residency MFA Creative Writing program, which is dedicated to advancing the work and careers of aspiring writers. Erdrich also directs Wiigwaas Press, which publishes books in Ojibwe (Anishinaabe), as well as films and other media.

On December 19, 2023, the City of Minneapolis announced that Erdrich was appointed as the city's first poet laureate.

Curatorial practice

In addition to being a poet, writer, and editor, Erdrich also has curated museum exhibitions in the Twin Cities area and across the nation. She is currently guest curator at Amherst College's Mead Museum. One early exhibition was part of the larger series called "Greening the Riverfront" which is a project aimed at exploring the history and transformation of the Minneapolis Riverfront. Erdrich's curation of this exhibit "fed a broader arterial network of Ojibwe and Indigenous women artists and activists who have worked to make visible the continuing claims of this and other threatened riverine systems " (Bernardin, 2017, pp. 39).

Awards and teaching

Her honors include a National Poetry Series award, two Minnesota Book Awards and a Native Arts and Cultures National Fellowship.

Erdrich has taught at Johns Hopkins University (1989-1992) and was tenured at the University of St. Thomas where she taught until 2007. Since leaving full-time teaching, Erdrich has taught at Augsburg University in the MFA in writing low-residency program and elsewhere. She was the 2019 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota Morris, the Glasgow Writer-in-Residence for Washington and Lee University in 2021, and the Elliston poet-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati in 2022. Also in 2022, Erdrich taught for a term in NAIS at Dartmouth College. She has also taught workshops for Native writers at Turtle Mountain Community College, along with her sister Louise.

Erdrich directs Wiigwaas Press, an Ojibwe language publisher. She has received two Minnesota Book Awards, as well as fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and others. From 2014 to 2022, she taught in the low-residency MFA creative writing program at Augsburg University. She was the 2019 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota Morris.