Background: Mal Waldron was born in New York City on August 16, 1925, to West Indian immigrants. His father was a mechanical engineer who worked on the Long Island Rail Road. The family moved to Jamaica, Queens when Mal was four years old. Waldron's parents discouraged his initial interest in jazz, but he was able to maintain it by listening to swing on the radio.
Context: Waldron went on to work with Ike Quebec in New York in 1950 and made his recording debut with the saxophonist in 1952. They played at Cafe Society Downtown on Mondays for six or seven months, which helped Waldron gain exposure and more work. Waldron worked frequently with Charles Mingus from 1954 to 1956, as part of the latter's jazz composers' workshop. He was pianist on several Mingus recordings, including Pithecanthropus Erectus, which was a key development in the movement towards freer collective improvisation in jazz. In 1955, Waldron worked with Lucky Millinder and Lucky Thompson. Waldron formed his own band in 1956, which consisted of Idrees Sulieman (trumpet), Gigi Gryce (alto saxophone), Julian Euell (bass), and Arthur Edgehill (drums). This band recorded Waldron's first release as a leader, Mal-1, in November of that year. Waldron was Billie Holiday's regular accompanist from April 1957 until her death in July 1959, including for the all-star television broadcast The Sound of Jazz.  Waldron played on numerous sessions for Prestige Records from 1956 to 1958, as he was the house pianist with the label, a position he acquired after being introduced to Prestige by saxophonist Jackie McLean. Waldron appeared on several McLean-led recordings, and was praised by critic John S. Wilson for these performances as being "a consistently interesting and inventive pianist, who apparently can create fresh and provocative ideas even in the midst of a shrilling bedlam". Other leaders he worked under at Prestige included Gene Ammons, Kenny Burrell, John Coltrane, and Phil Woods. Waldron often used his own arrangements and compositions for the Prestige sessions, of which his most famous, "Soul Eyes", written for Coltrane, became a widely recorded jazz standard following its initial appearance on the 1957 album Interplay for 2 Trumpets and 2 Tenors. He composed at night at home in St. Albans between all-day recording sessions, and in a car travelling to and from the studio in Hackensack. Waldron estimated that he composed more than 400 pieces of music during his time with Prestige.  After Holiday died, Waldron played with vocalist Abbey Lincoln and her husband, drummer Max Roach. Around this time, Waldron's playing on his own recordings became darker, featuring emotional shifts and variations in minor keys. In 1961, Waldron played in Eric Dolphy and Booker Little's quintet, a promising combination that ended when Little died that year, aged 23.  In addition to writing for his own band and those led by others, Waldron wrote and arranged for early play-along records that were published by Music Minus One. Some of these recordings on which Waldron played were released under his name. He also wrote scores for modern ballet in the 1950s and started writing film scores in the following decade. His writing for the film The Cool World (released in 1964) was described in The Oxford Companion to Jazz as one of the first attempts to stress improvisation rather than composition in a jazz-based film score.
Question: Did he have success with that?
Answer: This band recorded Waldron's first release as a leader, Mal-1, in November of that year.

Problem: Background: Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. (born October 7, 1966) is a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-American novelist, short story writer, poet, and filmmaker. His writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington. His best-known book is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a collection of short stories.
Context: In order to better his education, Alexie decided to leave the reservation and attend high school in Reardan, Washington. The school was twenty-two miles off the reservation and Alexie was the only Native American student. He excelled at his studies and became a star player on the basketball team, the Reardan High School Indians. He was elected as class president and participated as a member of the debate team.  His successes in high school won him a scholarship in 1985 to Gonzaga University, a Roman Catholic university in Spokane. Originally, Alexie enrolled in the pre-med program with hopes of becoming a doctor, but found he was squeamish during dissection in his anatomy classes. Alexie switched to law, but found that was not suitable, either. He felt enormous pressure to succeed in college, and consequently, he began drinking heavily to cope with his anxiety. Unhappy with law, Alexie found comfort in literature classes.  In 1987, he dropped out of Gonzaga and enrolled at Washington State University (WSU), where he took a creative writing course taught by Alex Kuo, a respected poet of Chinese-American background. Alexie was at a low point in his life, and Kuo served as a mentor to him. Kuo gave Alexie an anthology entitled Songs of This Earth on Turtle's Back, by Joseph Bruchac. Alexie said this book changed his life as it taught him "how to connect to non-Native literature in a new way". He was inspired by reading works of poetry written by Native Americans.  With his new appreciation of poetry, Alexie started working on what was published as his first collection, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, published in 1992 through Hanging Loose Press. With that success, Alexie stopped drinking and quit school just three credits short of a degree. However, in 1995, he was awarded a bachelor's degree from Washington State University.
Question: What did he study at WSU ?
Answer:
he took a creative writing course taught by Alex Kuo,