About

Marcie Rendon, enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, is a playwright, poet, and freelance writer. Rendon’s debut novel, Murder on the Red River (Cinco Puntos Press) will be available March 2017. She has four published nonfiction children’s books; two are Pow Wow Summer (MN Historical Press) and Farmer’s Market: Families Working Together (CarolRhoda). With four published plays she is the producer, creative mind behind Raving Native Theater, which produced Bring the Children Home… at the MN Fringe 2015 and 3 community-based venues in 2015-16. She also co-curated 6 Raving Native Date Nights in Minneapolis, 2016. In 2016-17 she is a recipient of the Loft’s Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship with poet Diego Vazquez. Her poem Wiigwaasabak will be featured in the St. Paul Almanac’s Impressions Project Summer 2017. Rendon is a community arts activist who supports other native artists/writers/creators to pursue their art.

Featured Work

Sinister Graves

2022
cover work of book Sinister Graves; orange fall colored with river running through middle of page

A snowmelt has sent floodwaters down to the fields of the Red River Valley, dragging the body of an unidentified Native woman into the town of Ada. The only evidence the medical examiner recovers is a torn piece of paper inside her bra: a hymn written in English and Ojibwe.

Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old, tough-as-nails Ojibwe woman, sometimes uses her special abilities to help Sheriff Wheaton, her guardian, with his investigations. When Cash sees the hymn, she knows her search for justice for this anonymous victim will lead her somewhere she hasn’t been in over a decade: the White Earth Reservation, a place she once called home.

When Cash happens upon two small graves in the yard of a rural, “speak-in-tongues kinda church,” she is pulled into the lives of the pastor and his wife while yet another Native woman turns up dead and her newborn is nowhere to be found.

Other Works

  • Girl Gone Missing

    2021

  • Murder on the Red River

    2017

  • Pow Wow Summer

    2014

Awards and Recognition

  • Minnesota Book Award Finalist 2022 for Sinister Graves
  • Girl Gone Missing nominated for the Sue Grafton Award 2021
  • Pinckley Debut Novel of the Year Award, 2017