Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie is an award-winning Native American poet, novelist, short story writer, performer, and filmmaker. Alexie’s poetry collections include Face (Hanging Loose Press, 2009), One Stick Song (Hanging Loose Press, 2000), and The Man Who Loves Salmon (Limberlost Press, 1998), among others. His novels include Flight (Grove Press, 2007); The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown and Company, 2007), which won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, among many other awards; Indian Killer (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), named a New York Times Notable Book; and Reservation Blues (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), which won a 1996 Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award and a Murray Morgan Prize.

His short story collections include Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories (Grove Press, 2012); War Dances (Grove Press, 2009), which won a 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction; Ten Little Indians (Grove Press, 2004); The Toughest Indian in the World (Grove Press, 2000); and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993), which won a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems (Hanging Loose Press, 1992) was his debut book. Alexie’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (Little, Brown and Company, 2017), was awarded the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction in 2018. However, Alexie declined the award following public allegations of sexual misconduct. 

Alexie has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 2009 Mason Award, the 2008 Stranger Genius Award, a Pushcart Prize, a PEN/Malamud Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, as well as numerous honorary degrees. Alexie was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 1996, and he won the 1991 Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship. In 1998, the all-Native-American film Smoke Signals, a collaboration between Alexie and Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho tribal member, was released at the Sundance Film Festival. He has been a guest on nationally broadcast radio and TV programs including The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NOW with Bill Moyers, and The Colbert Report.

As a performer of his own work, Alexie held the World Heavyweight Poetry title for four years. He continues to perform many of his poems at poetry slams, festivals, and other venues. He earned a BA in American studies from Washington State University in Pullman. A registered Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member, Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. He lives in Seattle, Washington.