Native American poet Heid E. Erdrich will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 3, in the Craven Lounge of the Morris Conference Center on campus. A book signing will follow the reading. Admission to the event is complimentary, and members of the community are invited to attend.
Erdrich’s appearance at SUNY Oneonta is part of the Red Dragon Reading Series and the series “Restoring Indigenous Presence: Opening the Door to Native Americans.” The event is made possible by a SUNY Diversity and Academic Excellence Grant from the SUNY Office of Diversity and Educational Equity and support from both the SUNY Oneonta Office of Equity and Inclusion and the Department of English.
Winner of the 2009 Minnesota Book Award, Erdrich has authored three books of poetry: “Fishing for Myth,” “The Mother’s Tongue,” and “National Monuments.” She also co-edited “Sister Nations: Native American Women on Community.”
Erdrich’s first play, “Curiosities,” premiered with Pangea World Theater in 2010. Her upcoming collection of new and selected poems, “Cell Traffic,” will appear in 2012.
Enrolled at the Turtle Mountain reservation, Erdrich is Ojibwe on her mother’s side and German-American on her father’s side. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Johns Hopkins University, she left her tenured teaching position at the University of St. Thomas to work in the urban American Indian community. Since 2007, she has served as curator and director for All My Relations Arts, a contemporary American-Indian fine arts initiative of the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis.