Louis Owens, of Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish American descent, was born in Lompoc, CA on July 18, 1948. He grew up in rural Mississippi and California. and worked as a forest ranger and firefighter for the U. S. Forest Service. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California, Davis. Louis taught at the University of California at Davis and at Santa Cruz, California State University at Northridge, the University of New Mexico, and was Professor of English and Native American Studies and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis at the time of his death in July, 2002.

Louis was a member of the editorial board of the Steinbeck Quarterly. He had been on the editorial board of New America, associate editor of American Literary Realism, and co-editor of American Literary Scholarship: An Annual, 1990. He had also been a member of the national committee for the Native American Literature Award and the Native American Prose Award, a member of the governing board of the Native American International Prize in Literature and a nominator for the National Medal of Arts. He had also been a member of the Advisory Board of the Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute.

He contributed more than a hundred articles and reviews to periodicals, including Northeast Indian Quarterly, Arizona Quarterly, San Jose Studies, American Indian Quarterly, and USA Today.

Louis was named Writer of the Year Award from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers for Mixedblood Messages, for 1998. He received the American Book Award for Nightland in 1997.

The books The Sharpest Sight and Other Destinies were co-winners of the Josephine Miles, PEN Oakland Award for 1993 and the The Sharpest Sight won the 1995 Roman Noir Award, France's equivalent of the Edgar Award. Bone Game was selected by an independent panel of judges as the winner of the Julian J. Rothbaum Prize for the best book published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1994.

Louis was a Fulbright lecturer in American literature at the University of Pisa, Italy (1980-1). He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1989 and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1987. He also received a New Mexico Humanities Grant (1987) and been named Outstanding Teacher of the Year by the International Steinbeck Society in 1985-6 and received the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1992.