With his debut novel,
Winter Counts, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, PhD ’07, became one of just a handful of Native American writers ever nominated for an Edgar Award, the highest honor in the world of mystery fiction.
Published in 2020, the back cover of the book features rave reviews from, among others, Tommy Orange and Stephen Graham Jones, two leading authors in the new wave of Native American writing that spans both genre and literary fiction.
Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and a former attorney who teaches Native American studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver, themed his book around the 1885 Major Crimes Act, which places felony crimes committed on a Native reservation under federal jurisdiction. His protagonist, Virgil Wounded Horse, is a vigilante trying to catch heroin dealers bringing drugs onto Native land.
The Edgar Award, as Denver author and Edgar finalist David Heska Wanbli Weiden puts it, is “like the Oscars for crime writers. It’s like our National Book Award.” So it was a big deal when Weiden’s thriller
Winter Counts was shortlisted. It’s an even bigger deal that he’s only the second Native American writer to be named a finalist in the prize’s storied history.
Not that the Edgars are the only organization recognizing Weiden’s work far from it. He’s already won a Lefty Award for Best Debut Novel, and the Western Writers of America presented his book with the Best Contemporary Novel and Best Debut Novel awards. Still pending is a cornucopia of other awards: the Barry, the Thriller, a Colorado Book Award, a Reading the West prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Weiden is going to be busy and he might want to be making space on his fireplace mantel for all those pen-shaped trophies and whatnot.
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