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 seven collections, including Little Big Bully (Penguin Editions, 2020), which received the 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; and Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (Michigan State University Press, 2017). She is 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). She is also the author of the mixed-genre chapbook Verb Animate (Tinderbox Editions, 2024).

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 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 other organizations.

Erdrich has been selected as the James and Lois Welch Distinguished Indigenous Visiting Writer at University of Montana Missoula for 2025. She regularly teaches at The Loft Literary Center and as a visiting writer. Erdrich serves on the board of Indigenous Nations Poets (IN-NA-PO). She was the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in November 2020. 

In 2023, Erdrich was appointed the inaugural poet laureate of Minneapolis through 2024. In 2024, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.