Heid Erdrich
Presenter: The Prose Poem: A Beautiful and Useful Hybrid Beast

A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, Heid Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She earned degrees from Dartmouth College and The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. She has been awarded fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, The Loft Literary Center, The Archibald Bush Foundation and others.

She teaches as a visiting author and scholar at colleges, universities, libraries, and arts and cultural organizations. She also works with visual artists and directs Wiigwaas Press, an Ojibwe language publisher. Her books are available at Birch Bark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis.

Heid is the 2009 winner of the Minnesota Book Award in poetry for her work entitled National Monuments. Three of her other books of poetry have also been nominated for the Minnesota Book Award: The Mother’s Tongue, Fishing for Myth and Sister Nations. Her current projects include a cookbook from the indigenous foods movement and a collaborative multi-disciplinary show called Artifact Traffic. Her most recent book is Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems.

Her presentation will focus on the prose poem. Heid will guide a “how to” exercise that reveals the beauty and use of this hybrid beast (part poem and part story), related to Japanese haiku and haibun poetic forms. This will be a relaxed approach to poetry for novices and poetry lovers alike.