Heid E. Erdrich

Heid E. Erdrich is a poet, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She was born in 1963 in Breckenridge, Minnesota, grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She received a BA from Dartmouth College, two MA degrees from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and a PhD from the Union Institute.

Erdrich is the author of numerous collections, including Little Big Bully (PenguinEditions, 2020), which received the 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; Verb Animate (Tinderbox Editions, 2020); and Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (Michigan State University Press, 2017). She is also the editor of New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018) and coeditor of Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002). 

Of her work, Dorianne Laux writes, “Heid E. Erdrich’s poems ferry us back and forth between what fuels us and what makes us human.”

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. She teaches in the low-residency MFA creative writing program at Augsburg University and is the 2019 distinguished visiting professor in liberal arts at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Erdrich is the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in November 2020.