Background
Ethnicity:
His mother, Margaret Seelye, was an Ojibwe. His father, Robert Treuer, was an Austrian Jewish survivor.
David Treuer was born on October 21, 1970 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, in the family of Rober and Margaret Treuer. His parents met when his father, Robert Treuer, an Austrian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, was teaching high school on her reservation. When they were in Washington, his father worked for the federal government and his mother attended law school. They returned to the Leech Lake Reservation, where the young Treuer and his two brothers were raised. Their mother became an Ojibwe tribal court judge.
Education
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. He received his Doctor of Philisophy in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1999.
Career
David has taught English at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, as well as Creative Writing for a semester at Scripps College in Claremont, California, as the Mary Routt Chair of Writing. In 2010 Treuer moved to the University of Southern California where he is a Professor of Literature and teaches in the USC PhD in Creative Writing & Literature.
Treuer has published stories and essays in Esquire, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, the LA Times, "The New York Times," "Lucky Peach," and Slate.com. He published his first novel, Little, in 1995, which features multiple narrators and points of view. His second, "The Hiawatha", followed in 1999. In the fall of 2006, Treuer published his third novel, "The Translation of Dr Apelles."
In 2012, Treuer published his fourth work, "Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life", which combines memoir with journalism about reservations.