Tommy Orange Biography

Tommy Orange was born January 19, 1982, in Oakland, California. His mother is white, and his father is part Cheyenne and part Arapaho, two Native American tribes. As a child, Orange’s exposure to Native American culture came mainly through his father, who spoke the Cheyenne language, and through occasional visits to his father’s family home on a reservation in Oklahoma.

Orange claims he did not do well in school as a child. In his early 20s, a job at a bookstore led Orange to discover his passion for reading and writing. The idea for a novel told in many voices and centered around a powwow (a Native American social gathering) set in Oakland came to Orange in 2010, when he was in his late 20s. Orange spent the following years writing his first novel. He received a MacDowell artists’ fellowship in 2014 and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico in 2016.

Orange sold his first novel to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., who published There There in June 2018. The book immediately began to garner critical acclaim, recognition, and awards. Many media outlets, among them Time, National Public Radio, the New York Times and Library Journal, included There There on their best-of lists for 2018. The book won the First Novel Prize from The Center for Fiction in 2018 and the Pen/Hemingway Award a year later. In 2019, There There became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Orange has taught creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in recent years.