2020 McKnight Distinguished Artist award, Marcie Rendon
Nominee, Mystery Writer's of America- THE G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS SUE GRAFTON MEMORIAL AWARD
In The Margins Recommended Fiction
Her name is Renee Blackbear, but what most people call the 19-year-old Ojibwe woman is Cash. She lived all her life in Fargo, sister city to Minnesota's Moorhead, just downriver from the Cities. She has one friend, the sheriff Wheaton. He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. Since then, Cash navigated through foster homes, and at 13 was working farms, driving truck. Wheaton wants her to take hold of her life, signs her up for college. She gets an education there at Moorhead State all right: sees that people talk a lot but mostly about nothing, not like the men in the fields she's known all her life who hold the rich topsoil in their hands, talk fertilizer and weather and prices on the Grain Exchange. In between classes and hauling beets, drinking beer and shooting pool, a man who claims he's her brother shows up, and she begins to dream the Cities and blonde Scandinavian girls calling for help.

Marcie Rendon is a citizen of the White Earth Nation. In 2020, she became the first Native American woman to receive the McKnight Distinguished Artist award. Her novel, Girl Gone Missing, Cinco Puntos Press, is the second in the Cash Blackbear series. The first, Murder on the Red River (2017 Cinco Puntos Press) won the Pinckley Women's Debut Crime Novel Award, 2018. It was a Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist 2018  in the Contemporary Novel category. Two nonfiction children's books are Pow Wow Summer (MN Historical Press) and Farmer's Market: Families Working Together (CarolRhoda). Rendon was recognized as a 50 over 50 Change-maker by MN AARP and POLLEN, 2018. With four published plays she is the creative mind of Raving Native Theater. She curates community created performance such as Art Is?CreativeNativeResilience which features three Anishinabe performance artists on TPT Public Television, June 2019. Diego Vazquez and Rendon received the Loft's 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for their work with women incarcerated in county jails.

Rendon was featured in Oprah Magazine's "31 Native American Authors to Read Right Now": "Rendon's Cash Blackbear series are gripping vehicles that tell broader stories about the historical persecution of American Indians."

Nothing in Renee Blackbear's world had prepared her for college or for the hurt that happens in the Twin Cities.

"Rendon's refreshing sequel to 2017's Murder on the Red River...When [Cash] hears about a missing coed, she contacts [Sheriff] Wheaton. Since they previously worked together successfully on a murder, Wheaton trusts Cash's sharp instincts and asks for her help in solving the case...Rendon, herself a member of the White Earth Anishinabe Nation, highlights the plight of Native Americans who were forcibly adopted by whites and Cash's discomfort in a land that is and is not hers. Readers will look forward to Cash's next outing."-Publishers Weekly
"In her second outing, Cash Blackbear goes off to college and finds herself embroiled in the mystery of a missing classmate.'I'm not used to folks treating me like I'm stupid,' says Cash. But Moorhead State is another world, one slow to disclose the secrets of its initiated."-Kirkus Reviews

"Rendon is a natural storyteller and a consummate writer, and we're indebted to Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso for bringing the unforgettable Cash Blackbear to life. There isn't a protagonist in recent fiction with the bearing of Rendon's creation, and we're the better for knowing her."-Jeffrey Mannix,Grand Rapids Herald-Review
"Darn that Marcie Rendon but she did it again. She wrote another book featuring Renee "Cash" Blackbear which invariably led to non-stop, compulsive reading and thoughts about the 19-year-old protagonist...This is a good book. If you read it, block out uninterrupted time. It's hard to put down."-Deborah Locke, The Circle News: Native American News and Arts
"The vivid writing and keen eye keep the pages turning and readers hoping for another book in this series."-Wendy J. Fox, Buzzfeed
"I was so glad to have more Cash to read?please keep writing about Cash. I love her brains, her broken heart, and her intuition." -Kirstin Cronn-Mills, author of The Sky Always Hears Me
"Against the landscape of a 1970s college town, the disappearance of a classmate draws Cash into a web of dreams, deceit and danger. Heart-stopping, heartrending and heartening, often all at the same time." - Linda LeGarde Grover, author of The Road Back to Sweetgrass
"Cash Blackbear is a complex, courageous character, full of her own integrity." -Linda Rodriguez, author of the Skeet Bannion Mysteries
"Murder on the Red River and Girl Gone Missing are excellent novels, so compulsively readable that they are difficult to put down...presenting compelling and engaging narratives that also touch on issues that face Indigenous peoples and communities." -Transmotion, Mary Stoecklein