Invisibility, Disappearance, and the Native American Future
Bestselling author David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Minnesota Book Awards, and fellowships from the NEH, Bush Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee was a 2019 finalist for both the National Book Award and Carnegie Medal. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at USC.
The son of Robert Treuer, an Austrian Jew and Holocaust survivor and Margaret Seelye Treuer, a tribal court judge, David Treuer grew up on Leech Lake Reservation. After graduating from high school he attended Princeton University where he wrote two senior theses—one in anthropology and one in creative writing—and where he worked with Toni Morrison, Paul Muldoon, and Joanna Scott. Treuer graduated in 1992 and published his first novel, Little, in 1995. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology and published his second novel, The Hiawatha, in 1999. His third novel The Translation of Dr Apelles and a book of criticism, Native American Fiction: A User's Manual appeared in 2006. The Translation of Dr Apelles was named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Time Out, and City Pages. He published his first major work of nonfiction, Rez Life, in 2012. His next novel, Prudence, was published by Riverhead Books in 2015. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, Esquire, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, Lucky Peach, The New York Times, The LA Times, Orion, and Slate.com.