Author and poet Louise Erdrich was among the first group of Native
Americans to be recruited and accepted to Dartmouth College in 1972,
shortly after it began admitting women.  Of German-American and Chippewa
descent, she was born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, and raised in
Wahpeton, North Dakota.  From Dartmouth she went on to receive a masters
degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.  She has published
several books, including Jacklight; Love Medicine, which won the National
Book Critics Circle Award; The Beet Queen, which appeared on The New York
Times bestseller list for four months in 1986; and most recently Tracks. 
She has received several awards including a National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship , as well as two PEN
syndicated fiction awards.