Each day leading up to the 30th annual Minnesota Book Awards Ceremony, we’ll be featuring an exclusive interview with one of our 36 finalists. Learn more about these incredible local writers and gear up to see the winners announced live in person April 21.
Interview with Heid E. Erdrich, author of Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media
Category: Poetry, sponsored by Wellington Management, Inc.
A bit shocked. This was a fantastic year for poetry in Minnesota. There are many deserving poets who did not make the cut, so I am grateful to the judges, but also to the Minnesota Poetry Class of 2018.
What does writing mean to you?
Writing is what I most need to do and most feel reasonable about. Everything else seems unreasonable – why am I doing this or that when I could write about it and more fully make meaning?
Why are stories important for our communities?
Important stories are always being told we just do not listen. We do not want to know that people of all sorts work incredibly hard just to survive. We misunderstand one another all the time, too, when we could instead see others struggles connected to our own and understand one another. It is one minute to midnight on the understanding clock, but we could do it. It’s supposed to be our one talent, we humans, our ability to talk. We just have to do more of it face to face.
Tell us something people might not know about you.
I have three amazing brothers (Mark, Louis, and Ralph) as well as two sisters who write (Louise and Lise) and a baby sister who is a doctor and a visual artist here in the Twin Cities.
What do you love about libraries?
Libraries remain democratic and sacred spaces, open to all, places that shelter individual humanities – that can save lives
More about Heid E. Erdrich:
Heid E. Erdrich is the author and editor of eight books, most recently the poetry collection Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. Heid co-edited the anthology of Native American women’s writings Sister Nations and is editor of New Poets of Native Nations forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2018. Her non-fiction memoir-in-recipes, Original Local: Indigenous Foods Stories was a 2014 City Pages Top Food Book. Heid’s awards include First Peoples Fund, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Loft-McKnight fellowship in prose. Heid has collaborated on award-winning poem videos created with an all-indigenous crew. Her most recent book incorporates her poem videos via QR codes. She is Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain. Heid teaches in the Augsburg College Low-residency MFA program.
See the winners announced live at the 30th annual Minnesota Book Awards Ceremony!
