Sherman Joseph Alexie

Sherman Joseph Alexie

Introduction

Sherman Alexie is a renowned writer and filmmaker with 16 books published to date, including Indian Killer, praised by The New York Times, and The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in Heaven, winner of PEN / Hemingway Award. His directorial debut, The Business of Fancydancing (2002), about a gay poet who returns to his guard for a funeral, won awards at gay film festivals in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and the Film Festival of Victoria. Alexie co-produced and wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals film pioneer, an adaptation of his story, This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona directed by Chris Eyre. Smoke Signals premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award and trophy filmmakers. Alexis has been a consultant creative scholarship program for Sundance Institute's Writers Workshop and Independent Feature Films screenplay West Screenwriters Lab, as well as serving on the committee selector for the Independent Spirit Awards.

Biography

Sherman Alexie is an award-winning Indian -American writer, poet, humorist and writer. He comes from the tribes of the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene from and grew up in Wellpinit in the Spokane Reservation , Washington. Today he lives with his wife and two sons in the city of Seattle in Washington (State). Sherman Alexie shows in his works relentlessly often dismal conditions in the reserves and urban Indians, and often with dark humor. Alexie won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. 

Alexie was born on October 7, 1966, near Spokane, Washington, the son of Sherman Joseph and Lilian Agnes (Cox) Alexie. After graduating from high school in 1985, he attended Gonzaga University for two years, dropping out briefly. Once back in Spokane, he enrolled in Washington State University and graduated in 1991.

In 1991, Alexie also received his first high honor: He was named a Poetry Fellow of the Washington State Arts Commission. A year later, he received funds from the National Endowment for the Arts to help him complete his first published volume of poems, “I Would Steal Horses”, and a collection of poetry and short fiction, “The Business of Fancy dancing”.

“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” marked the beginning of widespread public acclaim for Alexie, being reviewed by the American poet Reynolds Price in The New York Times Review of Books. Generally remarked on was Alexie's distinctive narrative voice and somber outlook, as well as his joining of contemporary references (for example, basketball and Diet Pepsi) to the search for lost American Indian culture. Although his references to contemporary products have been interpreted as an attempt on Alexie's part to imitate the style of mid-1980's novelists Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis, it probably is more accurately an ironic trope. In exchange for their culture, Alexie seems to suggest, American Indians have been given Diet Pepsi.

One of his more disturbing stories, “Distances,” is a post-nuclear holocaust story about life on the reservation: people dying of radiation sickness, mutated plant life, and the breakdown of the ...