Sierra Crane Murdoch has reported on the oil boom in North Dakota and its impact on the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation since 2011. Her work has been supported by a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, an 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship, a visiting fellowship in the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, and through MacDowell, she received the Sylvia Canfield Winn Award
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, the winner of an Oregon Book Award, and named one of the best books of 2020 by The New York Times. Murdoch worked on the second draft while in residence at MacDowell in 2017.
A regular contributor to Harper’s, she has also written for The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker online, Orion, The Atlantic, High Country News (where she was a staff writer and contributing editor), and This American Life.
At MacDowell in 2024, she completed a first draft of her second book, Imaginary Brightness: An Autobiography of American Guilt, which will be published by Random House in 2026. Several excerpts of this project have appeared in Harper's Magazine, including "Good Mother," which appeared in the October 2021 issue, and "Take the Medicine to the White Man," which appeared in the June 2023 issue. A meta-journalistic study blending memoir, field reporting, historical research, and cultural criticism, Imaginary Brightness threads together seven investigations of whiteness in relation to Indigeneity.
