Author and poet Louise Erdrich, winner of the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Love Medicine, will visit the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Monday, Oct. 10 for "An Evening with the Author." The public portion of the event begins at 6:45 p.m.; seating is free, on a first-come basis.
Erdrich, raised in North Dakota as the daughter of an Ojibwa Indian woman and a German-American man, is the author of 11 novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine was the first in a fictional tetralogy that focused on Native American and European-immigrant families over three decades in North Dakota. Her book The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Her latest, The Painted Drum, explores the power that lost children exert on the memories of those they leave behind.
Erdrich, who lives in Minnesota with her daughters and runs Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore, entered the first coeducational class of Dartmouth College in 1972 through the college's Native American Studies program. After graduating from Dartmouth with a degree in anthropology, she studied creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, where she received a master's degree in 1979. Several years later, she won the Nelson Algren fiction competition, and her first book of poetry, Jacklight, was published in 1984.
For more information about this event: 909-621-8244, or visit the current Fortnightly: http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/mmca/temp_fn.asp?volumeFN=21&issueFN=02&typeFN=f.