Sherman J. Alexie, Jr. was born in October of 1966 and grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA.
Shortly after graduating from WSU with a BA in American Studies, Alexie received the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. One year after graduation, his first two poetry collections, The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses, were published. His first collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, received a PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction.
Alexie won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award and the Murray Morgan Prize for his first novel, Reservation Blues. His second novel, Indian Killer, was named one of People’s Best of Pages and a New York Times Notable Book.
His most recent honors include the 2009 Swedish Peter Pan Award; the 2009 Mason Award; a 2008 Scandiuzzi Children’s Book Award; a Washington Book Award; a 2008 Stranger Genius Award; the 2008 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children’s Literature in Fiction; and the 2007 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature for his young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Alexie’s most recent work, War Dances, a collection of stories and poems, was published in 2009.
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