The Newberry has been closely monitoring developments related to COVID-19. To enable visitors to practice social distancing now recommended by both the Center for Disease Control and the Chicago Department of Public Health, we have decided to postpone this program. Please visit www.newberry.org/covid19 for more information and for regular updates regarding Newberry operations.
Join National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) as she discusses her latest book, The Night Watchman.
Based on the extraordinary life of Erdrich’s grandfather, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
Louise Erdrich has written 15 novels, as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
Following her talk, Ms. Erdrich will sign copies of the book, which will be available for purchase in the Newberry’s Rosenberg Bookshop.
This program is cosponsored by the National Museum of Mexican Art for the NEA Big Read. NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.
This program is part of the Newberry’s What Is the Midwest? project, funded by a major grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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