Join poets, writers and creative writing teachers, Michael Kleber Diggs and Heid E. Erdrich in a
wide ranging conversation on assumptions that are often made about their childhoods and
cultural experiences. They will talk about how they write around audience expectations of what
their upbringings must have been like, how they live as adults and their relationship to
community and economic class. Or they might get caught up in talking about how they make
poems.

This discussion is hosted in partnership with Hennepin County Libraries.

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ABOUT

Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is a poet, essayist, literary critic, and
arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the
Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022
Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. His poems and
essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs,
a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is
pursuing a BFA in Dance Performance at SUNY Purchase.

Heid E. Erdrich authored six collections of poetry and a nonfiction Indigenous foods book. Her
honors include a National Poetry Series award, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship,
Loft-McKnight Fellowship, Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and two Minnesota Book
Awards. Heid edited the anthology New Poets of Native Nations. Her recent poetry collection,
Little Big Bully, won the Balcones Prize for 2020. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota
with a German American father, an Ojibwe-Metis mother, and six siblings. She is enrolled at
Turtle Mountain. Heid works as an independent scholar and curator.
Writer to Writer is a collaboration with More Than a Single Story and Hennepin County Library.
Funded by Minnesota’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.