Image Description: Front cover of Among the Dog Eaters showing a sepia‑toned photograph of feathers and a hoop against a blue border.

About Among the Dog Eaters: A landmark poetry collection by Adrian C. Louis that portrays contemporary life on the Pine Ridge Reservation with raw honesty, dark humor, and fierce compassion. Blending lyric intensity with street‑level realism, the poems confront poverty, addiction, violence, love, and survival, giving voice to lives often ignored. The book is widely regarded as a powerful and unflinching work of Indigenous American poetry.

Praise for Among the Dog Eaters: 

Do not crack the pages of Among the Dog Eaters unless you are ready for the terrible truth of what it means to be Indian in the twentieth century. Adrian Louis is a tough, authentic American voice that will both disturb you and make you want to dance an other round in the heart of Indian country. —Joy Harjo

In Among the Dog Eaters, Adrian Louis blows on the ashes and ignites the cinders of language. But it is more than that. He carves language to contain experience that is hard to grasp and tell about. He deals with margin-life, the blood and betrayals, the bleak joys and raging ecstasies of our lonely, primal dance as human beings living in a world insanely intoxicated on our cheap thrills. —Jimmy Santiago Baca

About the Author: Adrian C. Louis is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Indian Tribe and was born and raised in Nevada. A former journalist, he has been the editor of four tribal newspapers and since 1984 has been teaching English at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. He is the recipient of several awards as well as fellowships from the South Dakota Arts Council, the Bush Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His 1989 book of poems, Fire Water World, was a winner of the Book Award from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.