Louise Erdrich was born in 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She received an M.A. degree from the John Hopkins University in 1979. Erdrich's fiction and poetry, draws on her Chippewa heritage to examine complex familial and sexual relationships among full and mixed blood Native Americans as they struggle with questions of identity in white European American culture. She is a novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist and a critic. Award-winning author Louise Erdrich published her first two books — Jacklight, a volume of poetry, and Love Medicine, a novel — at the age of thirty. The daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, the author explores Native American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. The first in a multi-part series, Love Medicine traces two Native American families from 1934 to 1984 in a unique seven-narrator format. The novel was extremely well received, earning its author numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. Since then, Erdrich has gone on to publish The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Bingo Palace, and Tales of Burning Love, all of which are related through recurring characters and themes.

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