AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR JIM NORTHRUP RECEIVES 2012 GEORGE MORRISON ARTIST AWARD

Washington, D.C., April 25 – Award-winning Anishinaabe author Jim Northrup has received the 2012 George Morrison Artist Award from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in Duluth, Minnesota. The Arrowhead Regional Arts Council’s mission is to facilitate and encourage local arts development. The Council’s mission statement grows from a conviction that the arts improve the quality of life in the region.

Northrup will receive his award at a public presentation and reception on Friday, May 18, beginning at 6:30 p.m. at the Jaques Art Center (121 2nd Street, N.W.) in Aitkin, Minnesota.

Northrup is an award-winning author, poet, journalist and playwright. He is the author of three books: Walking the Rez Road (Voyageur Press, 1993), Rez Road Follies, Canoes, Casinos, Computers, and Birchbark Baskets (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Anishinaabe Syndicated: A View from the Rez (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011). Walking the Rez Road won the Minnesota Book Award and Northeast Minnesota Book Award. In 2012, Anishinaabe Syndicated was a finalist for both of these awards. Northrup’s new book, titled Rez Salute, will be published by Fulcrum Publishing this fall.

Northrup’s monthly column, Fond du Lac Follies, is syndicated in several American Indian newspapers, including The Circle and News From Indian Country. The column has won countless awards and is known for its warm humor and sharp, political commentary. Northrup also has been a commentator on the Superior (Wisc.) Radio Network, National Public Radio, Fresh Air Radio, and the BBC-Scotland. One of his plays, Rez Road 2000, was performed at the Great American History Theatre in Saint Paul for a five-week run in January 2000.

In addition to his literary and journalistic work, Northrup has been a mentor in the Loft Inroads Program, a judge for the Lake Superior Contemporary Writers Series and The Jerome Fellowship, and a member of the Minnesota State Arts Board Prose Panel.

Northrup was also featured in a Jim Northrup: With Reservations, a video by Mike Hazard of the Center for International Education at the University of California-Irvine.

“I was born on the Rez, live on the Rez, and will probably die on the Rez,” says Northrup, referring to the Fond du Lac Reservation in northeastern Minnesota where he lives in the community of Sawyer. “’Twas a lot that happened in between, but was just details. And from those details I make my stories.”

The George Morrison Artist Award is named after internationally acclaimed visual artist George Morrison (1919-2000), an important member of the second generation of American abstract expressionist artists who was heralded for successfully synthesizing American Indian themes with abstraction and surrealism. Morrison, who resided and worked for many years in the Arrowhead Region of Minnesota, was a member of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.