Poets Heid Erdrich and Elena Cisneros read from their work.

Heid E. Erdrich, the Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Liberal Arts, is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Poetry Series, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, Loft Literary Center, First People’s Fund, and other honors. She has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid edited the 2018 anthology New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press. An interdisciplinary artist, Heid works as a visual arts curator and collaborator, and as an educator. She teaches in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program of Augsburg University and is the 2019 Distinguished Visiting Professor in Liberal Arts at University of Minnesota Morris. Her forthcoming poetry collections are Verb Animate, a chapbook due out from Tinderbox Editions in early 2020, and Little Big Bully, forthcoming from Penguin Editions in fall of 2020. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

Elena Cisneros is a poet living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Her first full-length collection of poetry, In the Shadow Country, has just appeared as this years' Wrolstad Poet from Tavern Books. She received her BA and MFA from Hamline University in Saint Paul, MN. She is the author of The Sad True Tales of J. Strait: In Which There Is Contemplation (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2012) as well as Dark Stars w/ artist Susan Solomon (Red Bird Chapbooks 2014).  Her poetry has appeared in the St. Paul Almanac, Sleet Magazine, Red Bird Broadsides, Coffee House Press Coffee Sleeves Project and the Minnesota Book Arts Winter Book Lessons For our Time (2012). She also was a finalist for the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose in the 2016-2017 year.