James Welch (poet)
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James Welch (1940–August 4, 2003), born in Browning, Montana, was an award-winning U.S. author and poet. His father was a member of the Blackfoot tribe and his mother a member of the Gros Ventre tribe.
He attended schools on the Blackfoot and Fort Belknap reservations. Welch then went to the University of Montana, where he studied under Madeline DeFrees and Richard Hugo, and then to Montana State University - Northern at Havre, before earning his B.A. from the University of Montana.
He taught at the University of Washington and at Cornell, as well as serving on the Parole Board of the Montana Prisons Systems and on the Board of Directors of the Newberry Library D'Arcy McNickle Center.
It was at the University of Montana that he found his knack for writing, becoming a crucial member of what is known as the Native American Renaissance. Welch published many books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. His hard, spare poems often evoke the bleakest side of contemporary Native American life. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature from the Native Writers’ Circle in 1997 for his excellence in Blackfeet/Gros Ventre Novelist and Poet. Winter in the Blood and Fools Crow received the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award. Welch and Paul Stekler co-wrote the Emmy Award-winning American Experience documentary, Last Stand at Little Bighorn, and together published the 1994 history Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. Welch died at age 62 in his home in Missoula, Montana.
[edit] Publications
- Riding the Earthboy 40
- Winter in the Blood
- Fools Crow
- Last Stand at Little Bighorn
- Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians
- The Death of Jim Loney
