James Welch (November 18, 1940 – August 4, 2003), who grew up within the Blackfeet and A'aninin cultures of his parents, was an award-winning Native American novelist and poet, considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance. His novel Fools Crow (1986) received several national literary awards.

In 1997 Welch received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.

Two contemporary classics from a major writer of the Native American renaissance During his life, James Welch came to be regarded as a master of American prose, and his first novel, "Winter in the Blood," is one of his most enduring works. The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted by personal tragedy, the dissolution of his once proud heritage, and Montanaas vast emptiness. "Winter in the Blood" is an evocative and unforgettable work of literature that will continue to move and inspire anyone who encounters it.