“Winter Counts is a marvel. It’s a thriller with a beating heart and jagged teeth. This book is a brilliant meditation on power and violence, and a testament to just how much a crime novel can achieve. Weiden is a powerful new voice. I couldn’t put it down.”

"Winter Counts is both a propulsive crime novel and a wonderfully informative book. David Heska Wanbli Weiden has written the first of what I hope is a series of books about life on Rosebud Reservation. Virgil Wounded Horse, his nephew Nathan, and Marie Short Bear are more than characters; they brim with intrigue and authentic life."

— Louise Erdrich, author of The Night Watchman


“David Heska Wanbli Weiden's Winter Counts marks the rise of a powerful new Native American voice in fiction, one that possesses an unnameable quality. With brilliant and precise prose, Weiden has created a deeply moving, heartfelt crime novel through Virgil Wounded Horse and his experiences of Native life. An astonishing debut novel.”
— Brandon Hobson, National Book Award Finalist and author of Where the Dead Sit Talking

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David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is the author of the novel WINTER COUNTS (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020) and the children’s book SPOTTED TAIL (Reycraft, 2019), winner of the 2020 Spur Award and finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. His work appears in Shenandoah, Yellow Medicine Review, Transmotion, and other magazines. He’s the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Ragdale Foundation residency, the PEN/America Writing for Justice Fellowship, and was a Tin House Scholar. He received his MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is a professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Brandon Hobson's novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. His new  novel, The Removed, will be released early 2021 from Ecco. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize, his writing has appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, NOON, The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, and elsewhere. Hobson is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University and teaches in the low-res MFA Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden on Winter Counts with Brandon Hobson