Bookworks And The Albuquerque Library Foundation Present Novelist Louise Erdrich

Bookworks and the Albuquerque Public Library Foundation are pleased to announce their next Word with Writers literary fundraiser, featuring novelist Louise Erdrich, on March 12th at the KiMo Theater.

Tickets are $35 and include a signed hardcover of Erdrich's new novel, The Night Watchman, and the option to add a free date ticket. Tickets will be on sale January 14 at bkwrks.com/louise-erdrich, at Bookworks, or via phone at 505-344-8139.

"Bookworks is absolutely thrilled to be presenting Louise Erdrich with the library foundation. She is one of our booksellers' and customers' favorite authors, and we've been trying to get an event with her for the last few years. The fact that we can also help financially support libraries is just icing on the cake," says Amanda Sutton, events and marketing director for Bookworks.

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning 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., her new novel explores love and death with lightness and gravity with her trademark master prose.

It is 1953, and Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new "emancipation" bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress.

Since graduating, Pixie Paranteau has gone by "Patrice." Patrice, class valedictorian, has no desire for marriage and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice's alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice is saving to move to Minneapolis with her sister Vera, who may have disappeared; she hasn't been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Erdrich creates a fictional world of memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature.

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen 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, was the winner of 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.

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