“The trouble with tragedy: re-imagining the past, present, and future”

Bestselling author David Treuer is Ojibwe 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 most recent book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, a Minnesota Book Prize winner, a California Book Prize winner, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. 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 (Graywolf), in 1995. He received his PhD in anthropology and published his second novel, The Hiawatha (Picador), in 1999. His third novel, The Translation of Dr Apelles (Graywolf and Vintage) and a book of criticism, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual (Graywolf) 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: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (Grove), in 2012. His next novel, Prudence, was published by Riverhead Books in 2015. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, Esquire, The Washington Post, Lucky Peach, The Los Angeles Times, among other outlets.

The Creative Matters lecture series is sponsored by the UI Office of the Vice President for Research, in collaboration with the UI Arts Advancement Committee. A Q&A session will follow his talk. The event is free and open to the public.

The Creative Matters lecture series, launched in Fall 2015, seeks to demonstrate that creativity and innovation are not only at the core of all research and discovery, but also central to our human experience. Our lineup of speakers includes artists, thinkers, builders, and doers who challenge conventional thinking about creativity, science, and artistic expression, and borrow from a range of influences and disciplines in their work.