Adrian C. Louis

As a member of the Lovelock Paiute tribe, writer Adrian C. Louis grew up in Nevada and earned a BA and an MA in creative writing from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Louis’s poetry collections include The Indian Cheap Wine Seance (1974), Fire Water World (1989), Among the Dog Eaters (1992), Blood Thirsty Savages (1994), Vortex of Indian Fevers (1995), Ceremonies of the Damned (1997), Ancient Acid Flashes Back (2000), Bone & Juice (2001), Evil Corn (2004), Logorrhea (2006), Savage Sunsets (2012), and Electric Snakes (2018).

A chronicler of Native American life, Louis stated his themes as “personal survival” in an interview for Geronimo: A Journal of Politics and Culture. “I’m writing about my life. I guess deep down I sort of fancy myself as speaking for certain kinds of people who don’t have a choice—for the downtrodden.” His novel Skins (1995) was made into a movie of the same title in 2002, directed by Chris Eyre. Louis also published a collection of short stories: Wild Indians & Other Creatures (1996).

Louis worked as a journalist and an editor and was a cofounder of the Native American Journalists Association. He was the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Fellowship. He taught at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota and at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota.