Mary Ruefle
Visiting Poet, Summer 2018
Tommy Orange
Visiting Fiction Writer, Winter 2021
Profile
Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There (Knopf), was a New York Times bestseller and named as one of the paper’s 10 Best Books of the Year for 2018. Its many honors include the 2018 PEN America Hemingway Award, The National Book Critics’ Circle John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California. He earned his MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he now serves as faculty.