Sierra Crane Murdoch is the author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of an Oregon Book Award, and named one of the best books of 2020 by The New York Times, NPR, and Publisher’s Weekly. Part true crime, part social criticism, Yellow Bird chronicles a murder on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, tracing the steps of an Arikara woman, Lissa Yellow Bird, as she searches for a young white oil worker who went missing from the reservation.
For eight years, Crane Murdoch reported on the oil boom in North Dakota and its impact on the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation. Her writing has appeared on This American Life and in Harper’s, VQR, The Paris Review, The New Yorker online, Orion, and The Atlantic, among others. The 2023 Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana, she has also taught at UC Berkeley and Middlebury College.
At MacDowell, in 2017, she worked on her first book, and in 2024, she worked on her second, Imaginary Brightness: An Autobiography of American Guilt, which is forthcoming from Random House.
