Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, on June 7, 1954, but was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She is of mixed Native American descent (French Ojibwa mother and German American father). She says of that influence: “My writing style is a mixture of the Ojibwe storyteller and the German system-maker. I find that everything that I write has to be connected into this grand scheme” (http://www.geocities.com/tonnelso/In-her-own-words.htm?200621). At Dartmouth University, in a class taught by Michael Dorris—who would later become her husband in 1981 and long-term professional collaborator until their separation and Dorris’s suicide in 1997—Erdrich first began the cultural examination of her heritage that inspired her subsequent poetry and fiction. She also acquired an MA from Johns Hopkins University. Erdrich’s long and short fiction, as well as her children’s stories (since 1990) are populated with central characters drawn from both Native and non-Native cultures. As critic Stewart O’Nan has written, “Erdrich has accomplished for Native Americans what Richard Wright and James Baldwin achieved for African Americans, Philip Roth for Jews and David Leavitt for homosexuals” (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a f/erdrich/onlineinterviews.htm). Her poems reflect the unresolved tension of trying to preserve the minority cultural heritage in the face of the dominant white culture. Currently she lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her three youngest children.