Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, writer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Night Watchman, will visit Concordia College’s Knutson Center Centrum, 901 8th St. S., Moorhead, on Thursday, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. for a presentation as part of the 2022 One Book, One Community reading project. This free event is open to the public and will offer with seating available on a first-come, first-serve basis. This event will be live-streamed on Concordia College’s website and available on the One Book One Community Facebook page. Books will be available for purchase during the event. For further details, contact Lori West at 701.476.5977.

Set near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota in the 1950s, The Night Watchman includes universal themes of community, family, love and freedom. The novel is based on Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C. It tells the little-known story of the U.S. government’s plans in the 1950s to “emancipate” the Turtle Mountain band and other tribes, and the efforts to end federal recognition of these tribes in order to force Natives off their ancestral land.

A leader in contemporary Native American literature, Louise Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. She has won numerous awards for both poetry and fiction, including the National Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and twice the National Book Critics Circle fiction award. She was a Pulitzer finalist in 2009 for The Plague of Doves.

Erdrich’s visit is sponsored in partnership by the Fargo, Moorhead, and West Fargo public libraries, Concordia College’s Carl B. Ylvisaker Library, Minnesota State University Moorhead’s Livingston Lord Library, North Dakota State University Libraries, the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County, the Indigenous Association and Moorhead Area Public Schools Indian Education.

In its 11th year, the One Book, One Community reading project centers on the community-wide reading of a single book and is dedicated to creating a shared conversation along with a range of related events and activities for residents of all ages. For more information about the One Book, One Community reading project, visit their website at www.1book1community.org.

All One Book, One Community events are free and open to the public. This author visit and project are made possible in part with funding from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the Lake Agassiz Regional Library and supported by Concordia Cultural Events, Friends of the Fargo Public Library, Friends of the West Fargo Public Library, Friends of the Moorhead Library and Moorhead Community Education.