A half-breed
Indian, Adrian C. Louis was born and raised in Nevada and is an
enrolled
member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. From 1984-98, he taught at Oglala
Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. Prior
to this, Louis edited four Native newspapers, including a stint as
managing editor of Indian Country Today. Since 1999, he
has been an English professor in the Minnesota State College system.
Louis has written
ten full-length books of poems and two works of fiction: SKINS, a novel, and WILD INDIANS & OTHER CREATURES, stories. SKINS was filmed in South Dakota (directed by Chris Eyre)
and had its national theatrical release in the summer of 2002. Adrian
C.
Louis has won numerous awards including a Pushcart Prize and fellowships
from the Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and
the
Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation. In 1999 he was elected to
the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame. Several new books are in pre-publication and are forthcoming in 2007-08. |
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“Adrian
C. Louis reaches
to the core of contemporary Native American life. An equation
of anger and survival, of acceptance and defiance brought into
delicate balance. It is work of profound honesty and out to be
read by everyone who cares to know the American heart.”
—N. Scott Momaday
“Pure American poetry at its
most powerful. Adrian Louis writes from the heart with a clarity
and an honesty that is as terrifying as it is healing.”
—Leslie Marmon Silko
“Over the past ten years, Adrian C.
Louis has emerged as one of the most powerful and compelling poets
in America. There is an astonishing ferocity of vision and a deep,
clarifying wisdom in his truly stunning poetry. Writing with a
rage of conscience that is simultaneously historical and urgent,
Louis is one of those rare voices we must carry with us into the
future.”
—David St. John
“Louis’s singular character and
talent to accord no slack in his account of the complex destiny
of Native Americans, white America’s genocidal disenfranchisement
of them, and his own frank self-portraits... Brutally honest,
yes, but also beautifully aglow with love of language.”
—James Tate
“Pay attention to Adrian Louis. He
is truly a voice in the wilderness. Prophetic, terrifyingly intelligent,
unconditionally germane. Anyone who overlooks him does so in peril.”
—Hayden Carruth
“Adrian Louis's hard-bitten, homegrown
(and marvelously learned) tongue speaks hard-won truths of North
America. His steady, fine-tuned stanzas, cutting and compassionate,
tough and funny, shine a hard light on everything—including
himself.”
—Gary Snyder
“There is no border in his poems between
the politics of the heart and the politics of the land. The music
that fills his body of stories is direct and ancient. Still, it
sounds like no one else’s.”
—Andrei Codrescu
“I’ve admired the poems of Adrian
C. Louis for many years. No other American poet sings better than
he does. No American poet knows how to grieve or rage better than
he does.”
—Thomas Lux
“Adrian Louis is one of those writers
we wait for and, believe me, he doesn’t disappoint.”
—James Welch
“Someone once told me that we're not
humans trying to become spiritual, but spirits trying to become
human and this book is proof of that: a spirit has found the body
of Adrian Louis and has given us these poems. I can’t recall
when I've been this excited by a new book of poems.”
—Bruce Weigl
“Adrian Louis is a tough, authentic
American voice that will both disturb you and make you want to
dance another round in the heart of Indian country.”
—Joy Harjo
“What a song he has to sing, what
a riddle to unravel! Adrian Louis, like Coyote—he’s
one quick step and a million dreams ahead of us all.”
—Carol Muske
“Adrian Louis channels the energy
of anger into poetry with as much incendiary power as any poet
writing in this country today. The damned have no more eloquent
voice.”
—Martín Espada
“Adrian Louis writes the purest kind
of elegy. In a voice that ranges from curse to prayer, often in
the same breath, he mourns the ghosts he walks among. If you’re
sick to death of decorative, palliative poetry, read Adrian Louis.”
—Chase Twichell
"Bone & Juice extends
the already considerable accomplishments of a poet I have admired
for years — for his unforced ironic humor in the face of histroical tragedy,
for his unshakable courage, and for his wisdom. His vision and
his voice are unique."
—Sam Hamill
"Mr. Louis is one of the few poets
working in the United States of whom I would be brave enough
to say is endowed with what Lorca called "Duende." That
rare, single, solitary, and powerful entity that makes of his
poems materspieces because they cut straight to the heart. He
holds nothing back, spares us nothing."
—Virgil Suárez
“I read one line in one poem
in particular that was revolutionary and revelatory. The line
was I’m in the reservation of my mind. It was by Adrian
Louis, a Paiute poet. For me, that was like Because I could
not stop for death, death kindly stopped for me... It was I sing the body electric... It was all that and more. It
was the first line I ever read in any work, anywhere that applied
to something I knew. It was a flash of lightning, a roll of thunder,
when I understood everything that I ever wanted to be. When I
read that line, I knew I wanted to be a writer.”
—Sherman Alexie |
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MINNESOTA STATE UNIVERSITY