Marcie Rendon
Keynote Speaker:
“We Are Still Here: Telling Our Stories Through Poetry, Fiction and Non-fiction”
“If you’re going to be a writer, you have to write from your own authenticity,” Rendon suggests. “Believe in your own story, your own words, your own flow.”
Marcie Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation and a renowned author, playwright, poet and freelance writer. A voracious reader as a young girl, she eventually started writing poetry and stories of her own.
One of her many successes was being listed as one of the top 30 Native American writers in the country by Oprah Magazine in 2020. She received Minnesota’s McKnight Distinguished Artist Award that same year. Rendon is also a community arts activist, supporting other native artists to pursue their individual art. She is a frequent speaker for colleges and community groups on Native issues, leadership and writing.
Rendon’s critically acclaimed murder mystery series features Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman who helps her mentor, Sheriff Wheaton, on some investigations. Blackbear has a gift which allows her to see and hear things no one else can. Rendon subtly weaves how Blackbear uses that gift into her stories without it being distracting. Sinister Graves, the third novel in the series, was a finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Awards.
As an Indigenous woman, mother and former therapist, Rendon uses her experience and intimate knowledge of Minnesota’s backroads and byways to craft tales about the good, and the evils, that exist in the underbelly of rural America.
About her keynote talk, Marcie notes that, “As Native people, we have known that in order to survive we had to create, re-create, produce and re-produce. The effect of the denial of our existence is that many of us have become invisible...the systematic disruption of our families by the removal of our children was effective for silencing our voices.”
“However, not everyone can still that desire, that up-welling inside that says sing, write, draw, move, be...we can sing our hearts out, tell our stories, paint our visions. We are in a position to create a more human reality… in order to live, we have to make our own mirrors.”