15 Facts About David Treuer

David Treuer's work published in 2006 was noted as among the best of the year by several major publications.

David Treuer was born in Washington, DC His mother, Margaret Seelye, was an Ojibwe woman who first worked as a nurse and was later a lawyer.

David Treuer's parents met when his father, Robert Treuer, an Austrian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, was teaching high school on her reservation.

David Treuer attended Princeton University; he graduated in 1992 after writing two senior theses, one in the anthropology department and one in the Princeton Program in Creative Writing.

David Treuer studied writing at Princeton with the authors Joanna Scott and Paul Muldoon; his thesis advisor in that program was the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.

David Treuer taught Creative Writing for a semester at Scripps College in Claremont, California, as the Mary Routt Chair of Writing.

David Treuer has published stories and essays in Esquire, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, "The New York Times," "Lucky Peach," The Atlantic, and Slate.

David Treuer published his first novel, Little, in 1995, which features multiple narrators and points of view.

That year, David Treuer published a book of essays, entitled Native American Fiction: A User's Manual.

David Treuer argues against Native American writing being read as ethnography rather than literature.

In 2012, David Treuer published his fourth work, Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life, which combines memoir with journalism about reservations.

David Treuer conveys material of his own experience, as well as examining issues on other reservations, including federal policies and Indian sovereignty, and cronyism in tribal governments.

David Treuer has a deep interest in the Ojibwe language and culture.

David Treuer's brother has been studying it since high school.

David Treuer believes that Native American cultures are threatened if their writers have only English to use as a language; he contends that the tribes need their own languages to perpetuate their cultures.