Brief

(about 50 words)

Heid E. Erdrich’s 2024 book is Verb Animate. Her 2020 book Little Big Bully won a National Poetry Series award. She is a curator, editor, and teacher. Heid edited New Poets of Native Nations and co-edited the 2025 publication Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature. Heid is Ojibwe and enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

(100 words)

Author of nine books of poetry and prose Heid E. Erdrich is a curator and teacher. Erdrich edited the anthology New Poets of Native Nations and co-edited the newly published Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature. She served as the inaugural Minneapolis Poet Laureate supported by an Academy of American Poets award. Erdrich held the 2025 James Welch Distinguished Visiting position at University of Montana Missoula. Erdrich’s on-going project is Poetry Service Announcement (PoeS.A.) which promotes poetry as public art. She serves her communities through formal and informal mentorship, poetry interventions, and in activating collaborative response between communities.

BACKGROUND STORY

Heid E. Erdrich was born in 1963 in Breckenridge, Minnesota, grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Her mother’s family are Ojibwe, Metis, French Canadian and other Euro-Americans. Her father’s parents came from Germany in the 1920’s. Erdrich received a BA from Dartmouth College, two MA degrees from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and a self-directed PhD in Native American Literature and Writing from the Union Institute.

Erdrich is the author of numerous collections, including Little Big Bully (Penguin, 2020);  Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (Michigan State University Press, 2017) and four other collections as well as the forthcoming Verb Animate. She is also the regional editor for When the Light of the World was New, Our Songs Came Through (Norton, 2021), a Norton anthology of Native American poetry edited by Joy Harjo, the editor of New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018), and co-editor of Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002). Her most recent books are Verb Animate: Poems and Prompts from Collaborative Acts (Trio House Press, 2024) and, co-edited with Lisa M. Crossman, publication Boundless: Abundance in Native American Literature and Art (Amherst College Press, 2025).

Erdrich has received two Minnesota Book Awards, as well as fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Academy of American Poets, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and others. Her poetry collection Little Big Bully won the Balcones Prize and the Library of Congresses Bobbitt prize.

Heid has taught undergraduate, graduate, and community students for decades, receiving tenure at University of St. Thomas where she taught until 2007. Erdrich has taught at Loft Literary Center regularly since 1993. She served as a mentor to Augsburg University’s MFA in Creative Writing program from 2014 to 2022. Erdrich has visited dozens of colleges and universities, libraries, and tribal and cultural institutions as a guest speaker and teacher.

Heid served as the 2019 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota Morris, the 2021 Glasgow Writer-in-Residence at  Washington and Lee, the 2022 Elliston Writer-in-Residence for University of Cincinnati, and she taught a term in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Dartmouth College. In 2025, Erdrich served as the James Welch Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Montana Missoula.

An independent scholar and collaborative artist, since 2005 Heid E. Erdrich has written, produced, and directed short films and installations, curated dozens of exhibitions of Native American art, and served as literary art curator to the Hearts of Our People exhibit of Native American women’s art. Heid was guest curator for Amherst College’s Mead Museum from 2020-2024. She curated Once Upon a Shore for Minnesota Marine Art Museum, which is on view through 2025.