Karen Louise Erdrich was born on June 7th in Little Falls, Minnesota. Her maternal grandfather was the tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, home to several clans of the Ojibwe nation. Her father is German American. Ms. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs School.

She attended Dartmouth College and Johns Hopkins. She married Michael Dorris, an anthropologist and author. Together, they had three children. Mr. Dorris died in 1987.

Her first book, Love Medicine, was published in 1984. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author of many books for adults, she published her first children's book, Grandmother's Pigeon, in 1996. Since then, she has published The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence, about young Omakayas, an Ojibwe girl growing up in the 1850s on an island in Lake Superior. The Birchbark House was a National Book Award Finalist. Her picture book, The Range Eternal, illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher, is a favorite of many.

Ms. Erdrich lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

—Vicki Palmquist