Novelist Tommy Orange, a Native (in both the sense that he was born and grew up in the yet to be mentioned location, and because he is Native in the Native American/American Indian sense, which kind of Native American...? to be specific: Southern Cheyenne) of Oakland, CA. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He received an honorable mention in the 2013 Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction contest judged by David Means.
While at MacDowell in 2014, he worked on his first novel, There There, which became a New York Times bestseller and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the 2019 American Book Award.
