The eldest of seven children, Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota on July 6, 1954. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. In 1972, Erdrich was among the first women admitted to Dartmouth College. Love Medicine is Erdrich’s first and most critically acclaimed novel. Erdrich received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Fiction for Love Medicine. Erdrich has also won the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, the O. Henry Prize for short fiction, the Western Literary Association Award, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several of her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories series. Erdrich’s short fiction has also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review. She is one of few American Indian writers who are widely read.