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 an Ojibwe novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist and a critic. Photo by Jenn Ackerman.