A half-breed Indian, Adrian C. Louis was born and raised in northern Nevada and is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. He is a graduate of Brown University where he also earned a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. From 1984-97, Louis taught at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. Prior to that, he edited four Native newspapers including The Lakota Times and later Indian Country Today and was a co-founder of the Native American Journalists Association.
Louis was Professor of English at the Minnesota State University in Marshall from 1999 to his retirement in 2014. He continues to lurk in the dystopian cornfields of southwestern Minnesota. He has written twelve books of poems and two works of fiction: WILD INDIANS & OTHER CREATURES, short stories, and SKINS, a novel. SKINS was produced as a feature film directed by Chris Eyre. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, had its theatrical release in 2002, and was sketchy at best.
Adrian Louis has won various writing awards including Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation. His 2006 collection of poems, LOGORRHEA (Northwestern University Press), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. THE BIBLE OF ADRIAN, a new, limited edition chapbook is currently available directly from the author. In April 2018, his new full-length collection, ELECTRIC SNAKES, was published by The Backwaters Press. He commands you to go to amazon.com and order it. You know the drill. Make it so.