2013 Authors-in-Residence: Louise Erdrich and Domingo Martinez

ErdrichLouise Erdrich, 2012 National Book Award Fiction winner

Louise Erdrich is the author of The Round House. The National Book Award fiction judges’ citation states that "Erdrich has created an intricately layered novel that not only untangles our nation’s history of moral and judicial failure, but also offers a portrait of a community sustained by its traditions, values, faith, and stories.” Erdrich is the author of 14 novels as well as volumes of poetry, short stories, children's books and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. Most recently, The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.


About The Round House:
One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared. While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

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MartinezDomingo Martinez, 2012 National Book Award Nonfiction finalist

Domingo Martinez is the author of the The Boy Kings of Texas. The National Book Award nonfiction judges’ citation states: “With sentences that often burst like small fireworks, this is a brave book, an angry dissection of the macho values that dominated his upbringing and a sorrowful account of his love, often betrayed, for his family — most poignantly, for his brother. Like the best of its genre, this memoir is absolutely specific and totally universal.” Martinez has worked as a journalist and designer in Texas and Seattle. His work has appeared in Epiphany, and he has contributed to The New Republic. He has read pieces from The Boy Kings of Texas on NPR’s “This American Life.” An excerpt from The Boy Kings of Texas was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize.


About The Boy Kings of Texas:
Domingo Martinez lays bare his interior and exterior worlds as he struggles to make sense of the violent and the ugly, along with the beautiful and the loving, in a Texas border town in the 1980s. Partly a reflection on the culture of machismo and partly an exploration of the author’s boyhood spent in his sister’s hand-me-down clothes, The Boy Kings of Texas delves into the enduring and complex bond between Martinez and his deeply flawed but fiercely protective older brother, Daniel, and features a cast of memorable characters. Charming, painful and enlightening, this book examines the traumas and pleasures of growing up in South Texas and the often terrible consequences when two very different cultures collide on the banks of a dying river.

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Neal Conan

Neal Conan, Readings and Conversation host

Award-winning journalist Neal Conan is the host of "Talk of the Nation," the national news-talk call-in show from NPR News. Conan brings three decades of news and radio experience to the show, which reaches 3.4 million listeners a week on more than 300 NPR member stations.

A familiar voice on NPR for the past quarter century, Conan has worked as a reporter based in New York, Washington and London — he served as NPR's Bureau Chief in both New York and London — and anchored NPR live coverage of events including national political conventions, inaugurations and an impeachment. For five years, he hosted "Weekly Edition: The Best of NPR News."

Following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, Conan played a major role anchoring NPR's continuous live coverage, a part he reprised during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2004, in Des Moines, Iowa, he hosted the first radio-only presidential candidates' debate since 1948. On the other side of the microphone, Conan has also served as editor, producer and executive producer of NPR's flagship evening news magazine, "All Things Considered," and, at various times, acted as NPR's foreign editor, managing editor and news director.

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