Waubgeshig Rice Books in Order

If you want his signature post-apocalyptic novels: Moon of the Crusted Snow → Moon of the Turning Leaves
If you want a family story grounded in grief and community: Legacy
If you want to start with linked short fiction: Midnight Sweatlodge
If you want to read in publication order: Midnight Sweatlodge → Legacy → Moon of the Crusted Snow → Moon of the Turning Leaves

Waubgeshig Rice is an Anishinaabe writer and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation. He was born in Toronto and grew up in Wasauksing, an island community on Georgian Bay near Parry Sound, Ontario.

That sense of home never really leaves his work.

Rice got his first taste of journalism as a teenager during a student exchange year in Germany, when he wrote articles for Anishinabek News about being an Anishinaabe kid far from home. He later studied journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, graduating in 2002. After that he freelanced, worked in community radio, and spent most of his journalism career with CBC in places including Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Northern Ontario.

He has said he was fortunate to grow up while his home community was reconnecting with Anishinaabe culture and stories. You can feel that in his books. Family, ceremony, land, and language are not just scenery. They shape how people think, mourn, argue, and look after one another. Years of reporting also taught him to listen closely and trust the texture of everyday conversation.

Fiction developed slowly beside the day job. Some of the material that became Midnight Sweatlodge started when he was still in high school, and after years of revision, mentorship, and grant-supported work, the collection was published in 2011. Built around a healing ceremony, those linked stories look closely at pain, memory, and the search for balance in contemporary Indigenous life. The book went on to win a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award.

His first novel, Legacy, followed in 2014. It centers on the Gibson family after a devastating loss and shows Rice's interest in grief, injustice, and the way hurt can ripple through a whole community. Legacy is quieter than the Moon books, but no less intense. That same year he received the Anishinabek Nation's Debwewin Citation for excellence in First Nation storytelling.

He takes community seriously.

A much wider audience found him through Moon of the Crusted Snow in 2018. Set in a northern Anishinaabe community after a mysterious blackout, the novel is tense and unsettling, but also patient and practical. Rice pays close attention to winter, food, leadership, and the small choices that can hold people together or split them apart. Readers often respond to that mix of quiet dread and lived-in realism, and to the way Anishinaabe knowledge shapes the future. The book became a bestseller and won the 2019 Evergreen Award.

Rice returned to that world in Moon of the Turning Leaves, published in 2023. The sequel follows Evan Whitesky and a small scouting party, including his teenage daughter Nangohns, as they head south toward their ancestral homeland. Across both Moon novels, he keeps asking what home means, what elders and younger people owe each other, and how people rebuild without forgetting where they come from. Even at their darkest, these books leave room for endurance, humor, and renewal.

In 2020 he left CBC to focus on writing full time. He has since spoken widely about writing, oral storytelling, and Indigenous representation in media, and he co-hosted the Indigenous books podcast Storykeepers with Jennifer David. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario, with his wife and three sons. Even when he writes about collapse, he keeps one eye on the kitchen table, the woodpile, the shoreline, and the everyday responsibilities that tell you who people really are.