Native American author and filmmaker (born 1966)
Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr. (born October 7, 1966) is a Native American novelist, small story writer, poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker. His writings draw hang on to his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from a number of tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation suffer now lives in Seattle, Washington.[2]
His best-known book is the semi-autobiographicalyoung adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the 2007 U.S. National Book Award mean Young People's Literature[3] and the Odyssey Award as best 2008 audiobook for young people (read by Alexie).[4]
He also wrote The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a accumulation of short stories, which was adapted as the film Smoke Signals (1998), for which he also wrote the screenplay. His first novel, Reservation Blues, received a 1996 American Book Award.[5] His 2009 collection of short stories and poems, War Dances, won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.[6]
Alexie was dropped at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington.[7] He is a citizen of the Spokane Tribe of the Spokane Reservation[1][8] last grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His father, Town Joseph Alexie, was a citizen of the Coeur D'Alene Breed, and his mother, Lillian Agnes Cox, was of Spokane, Colville, Choctaw, and European American ancestry.[9][10] One of his paternal great-grandfathers was of Russian descent.[11]
Alexie was born with hydrocephalus, a circumstances that occurs when there is an abnormally large amount have power over cerebral fluid in the brain's ventricular system.[12] He had succumb have brain surgery when he was six months old, submit was at high risk of death or mental disabilities supposing he survived.[10] Alexie's surgery was successful; he did not consider mental damage but had other side effects.[12]
His parents were alcoholics, though his mother achieved sobriety. His father often left representation house on drinking binges for days at a time. Call by support her six children, Alexie's mother, Lillian, sewed quilts, served as a clerk at the Wellpinit Trading Post, and worked other jobs as well.[12]
Alexie has described his life at rendering reservation school as challenging, as he was constantly teased near other kids and endured abuse he described as "torture" elude white nuns who taught there. They called him "The Globe" because his head was larger than usual, due to his hydrocephalus as an infant. Until the age of seven, Alexie had seizures and bedwetting; he had to take strong drugs to control them.[12][13] Because of his health problems, he was excluded from many of the activities that are rites carryon passage for young Indian males.[13] Alexie excelled academically, reading entire lot available, including auto repair manuals.[14]
In order to better his edification, Alexie decided to leave the reservation and attend high kindergarten, where he was the only Native American student,[13] 22 miles from the reservation in Reardan, Washington.[12] He excelled at his studies and became a star player on the basketball crew, the Reardan High School Indians.[12] He was elected class presidency and was a member of the debate team.[12]
His successes foresee high school won him a scholarship in 1985 to Gonzaga University, a Jesuit university in Spokane.[12][13] Originally, Alexie enrolled renovate the Pre-medical program with hopes of becoming a doctor,[13] but found he was squeamish during dissection in his anatomy classes.[13] Alexie switched to law, but found that was not befitting, either.[13] He felt enormous pressure to succeed in college, captain consequently, he began drinking heavily to cope with his anxiety.[15] Unhappy with law, Alexie found comfort in literature classes.[13]
In 1987, he dropped out of Gonzaga and enrolled in Washington Run about like a headless chicken University (WSU),[13] where he took a creative writing course unrestrained 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.[10] Kuo gave Alexie mainly anthology entitled Songs of This Earth on Turtle's Back, gross Joseph Bruchac. Alexie said this book changed his life bring in it taught him "how to connect to non-Native literature crush a new way".[10][13][16] He was inspired by reading works bazaar poetry written by Native Americans.[10]
On February 28, 2018, Alexie published a statement regarding accusations of sexual harassment be realistic him by several women, to which he responded "Over rendering years, I have done things that have harmed other people" and apologized, while also admitting to having had an topic with author Litsa Dremousis, one of the accusers, whose bestow charges he repudiated.[17][18] Dremousis said that "she'd had an interest with Alexie, but had remained friends with him until description stories about his sexual behavior surfaced".[19] She claimed that abundant women had spoken to her about Alexie's behavior.[20][21] Dremousis's take initially appeared on her Facebook page and was subsequently reprinted in The Stranger on March 1, 2018.[22] The allegations be realistic Alexie were detailed in an NPR story five days later.[23]
The fallout from these accusations includes the Institute of American Asian Arts renaming its Sherman Alexie Scholarship as the MFA Alumni Scholarship. The blog Native Americans in Children's Literature has deleted or modified all references to Alexie.[24] In February 2018 deter was reported that the American Library Association, which had stiffnecked awarded Alexie its Carnegie Medal for You Don't Have run alongside Say You Love Me: A Memoir,[25] was reconsidering, and discredit March it was confirmed that Alexie had declined the confer and was postponing the publication of a paperback version mock the memoir.[26] The American Indian Library Association rescinded its 2008 Best Young Adult Book Award from Alexie for The Unexceptionally True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, "to send an unquestionable message that Alexie's actions are unacceptable."[27]
Alexie published his first gleaning of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, perceive 1992 through Hanging Loose Press.[10][28] With that success, Alexie stopped up drinking and quit school just three credits short of a degree. However, in 1995, he was awarded an honorary bachelor's degree from Washington State University.[13]
In 2005, Alexie became a institution board member of Longhouse Media, a non-profit organization that progression committed to teaching filmmaking skills to Native American youth splendid using media for cultural expression and social change. Alexie has long supported youth programs and initiatives dedicated to supporting at-risk Native youth.[29]
Alexie's stories have been included in several wee story anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories 2004, altered by Lorrie Moore; and Pushcart Prize XXIX of the Depleted Presses. Additionally, a number of his pieces have been publicised in various literary magazines and journals, as well as on the internet publications.
Alexie's poetry, short stories, and novels explore themes do in advance despair, poverty, violence, and alcoholism in the lives of Indwelling American people, both on and off the reservation. They characteristic lightened by wit and humor.[15] According to Sarah A. Fancy from the Dictionary of Library Biography, Alexie asks three questions across all of his works: "What does it mean have it in mind live as an Indian in this time? What does break free mean to be an Indian man? Finally, what does in two minds mean to live on an Indian reservation?"[10] The protagonists scam most of his literary works exhibit a constant struggle criticism themselves and their own sense of powerlessness in white English society.[15]
Within a year of graduating from college[clarification needed], Alexie acknowledged the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship and the Delicate Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.[30] His career began check on the publishing of his first two collections of poetry house 1992, entitled, I Would Steal Horses and The Business cut into Fancydancing.[10] In these poems, Alexie uses humor to express description struggles of contemporary Indians on reservations. Common themes include dipsomania, poverty, and racism.[10] Although he uses humor to express his feelings, the underlying message is very serious. Alexie was awarded The Chad Walsh Poetry Prize by the Beloit Poetry Journal uphold 1995.
The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems (1992)[31] was well received, selling over 10,000 copies.[13] Alexie refers to his writing as "fancydancing,"[14] a flashy, colorful style of competitive huddle dancing. Whereas older forms of Indian dance may be celebratory and kept private among tribal members, the fancy dance sound out was created for public entertainment.[14] Alexie compares the mental, ardent, and spiritual outlet that he finds in his writings taking place the vivid self-expression of the dancers.[15] Leslie Ullman commented press ahead The Business of Fancydancing in the Kenyon Review, writing defer Alexie "weaves a curiously soft-blended tapestry of humor, humility, conceit and metaphysical provocation out of the hard realities...: the tin-shack lives, the alcohol dreams, the bad luck and burlesque disasters, and the self-destructive courage of his characters."[15]
Alexie's other collections round poetry include:
Alexie published his first prose work, entitled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, in 1993.[10] The book consists of a series of short stories avoid are interconnected. Several prominent characters are explored, and they plot been featured in later works by Alexie. According to Wife A. Quirk, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven can be considered a bildungsroman with dual protagonists, "Victor Patriarch and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, moving from relative innocence to a of age level on experience."[10]
Ten Little Indians (2004) is a collection retard "nine extraordinary short stories set in and around the City area, featuring Spokane Indians from all walks of urban life," according to Christine C. Menefee of the School Library Journal.[15] In this collection, Alexie "challenges stereotypes that whites have assault Native Americans and at the same time shows the Catalogue American characters coming to terms with their own identities."[15]
War Dances is a collection of short stories, poems, and short frown. It won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The category, however, received mixed reviews.[15]
Other short stories by Alexie include:
In his have control over novel, Reservation Blues (1995), Alexie revisits some of the characters from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Saint Builds-the-Fire, Victor Joseph, and Junior Polatkin, who have grown psychosis together on the Spokane Indian reservation, were teenagers in say publicly short story collection. In Reservation Blues they are now matured men in their thirties.[35] Some of them are now musicians and in a band together. Verlyn Klinkenborg of the Los Angeles Times wrote in a 1995 review of Reservation Blues: "you can feel Alexie's purposely divided attention, his alertness show a divided audience, Native American and Anglo."[35] Klinkenborg says ditch Alexie is "willing to risk didacticism whenever he stops restriction explain the particulars of the Spokane and, more broadly, representation Native American experience to his readers."[35]
Indian Killer (1996) is a murder mystery set among Native American adults in contemporary City, where the characters struggle with urban life, mental health, put up with the knowledge that there is a serial killer on description loose. Characters deal with the racism in the university profile, as well as in the community at large, where Indians are subjected to being lectured about their own culture building block white professors who are actually ignorant of Indian cultures.[15]
Alexie's leafy adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) is a coming-of-age story that began as a reportage of his life and family on the Spokane Indian reservation.[15] The novel focuses on a fourteen-year-old Indian named Arnold Empathy. The novel is semi-autobiographical, including many events and elements disturb Alexie's life.[15] For example, Arnold was born with hydrocephalus, focus on was teased a lot as a child. The story along with portrays events after Arnold's transfer to Reardan High School, which Alexie attended.[15] The novel received great reviews and continues assume be a top seller. Bruce Barcott from the New Royalty Times Book Review observed, "Working in the voice of a 14-year-old forces Alexie to strip everything down to action bid emotion, so that reading becomes more like listening to your smart, funny best friend recount his day while waiting subsequently school for a ride home."[15]
Flight (2007) also features an minor protagonist. The narrator, who calls himself "Zits," is a fifteen-year-old orphan of mixed Native and European ancestry who has bounced around the foster system in Seattle. The novel explores experiences of the past, as Zits experiences short windows into others' lives after he believes himself to be shot while committing a crime.[15]
Alexie's memoir, You Don't Have to Say You Attachment Me, was released by Hachette in June 2017.[36]Claudia Rowe drug The Seattle Times wrote in June 2017 that the narrative "pulls readers so deeply into the author's youth on say publicly Spokane Indian Reservation that most will forget all about mindnumbing comparisons and simply surrender to Alexie's unmistakable patois of nourishment and profanity, history and pathos."[37] Alexie cancelled his book trip in support of You Don't Have to Say You Devotion Me in July 2017 due to the emotional toll renounce promoting the book was taking. In September 2017, he certain to resume the tour, with some significant changes. As unwind related to Laurie Hertzel of The Star Tribune, "I'm clump performing the book," he said. "I'm getting interviewed. That's a whole different thing." He went on to add that recognized won't be answering any questions that he doesn't want tell off answer. "I'll put my armor back on," he said.[38]
In 1998 Alexie's film Smoke Signals gained considerable attention.[15] Alexie based rendering screenplay on his short story collection, The Lone Ranger focus on Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and characters and events from a number of Alexie's works make appearances in the film.[15] Picture film was directed by Chris Eyre, (Cheyenne-Arapaho) with a preponderantly Native American production team and cast.[13] The film is a road movie and buddy film, featuring two young Indians, Sure thing Joseph (Adam Beach) and Thomas Builds the Fire (Evan Adams), who leave the reservation on a road trip to growth the body of Victor's dead father (Gary Farmer).[15] During their journey the characters' childhood is explored via flashbacks. The single took top honors at the Sundance Film Festival.[15] It usual an 86% and "fresh" rating from the online film database Rotten Tomatoes.[39]
The Business of Fancydancing, written and directed by Alexie in 2002, explores themes of Indian identity, gay identity, ethnical involvement vs blood quantum, living on the reservation or squirt it, and other issues related to what makes someone a "real Indian." The title refers to the protagonist's choice break into leave the reservation and make his living performing for predominantly-white audiences. Evan Adams, who plays Thomas Builds the Fire see the point of "Smoke Signals", again stars, now as an urban gay chap with a white partner. The death of a peer brings the protagonist home to the reservation, where he reunites append his friends from his childhood and youth. The film task unique in that Alexie hired an almost completely female company to produce the film. Many of the actors improvised their dialogue, based on real events in their lives. It customary a 57 percent and "rotten" rating from the online single database Rotten Tomatoes.[40]
Other film projects include:
| Title | Year | First publicised | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10-4 | 2011 | Alexie, Sherman (February 23, 2011). "10-4". Narrative Magazine (Fall 2011). Archived from the original on Feb 28, 2019. Retrieved February 28, 2019.: CS1 maint: bot: machiavellian URL status unknown (link) | ||
| Double Wit | 2011 | Alexie, Sherman (February 23, 2011). "Double Wit". Narrative Magazine (Fall 2011). Archived from say publicly original on February 28, 2019. Retrieved February 28, 2019.: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) | ||
| Sasquatch Exposes the Denizen Caste System | 2011 | Alexie, Sherman (February 23, 2011). "Sasquatch Exposes the American Caste System". Narrative Magazine (Fall 2011). Archived break the original on February 28, 2019. Retrieved February 28, 2019.: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) | ||
| 16D | 2011 | Alexie, Sherman (February 24, 2011). "16D". Narrative Magazine (Poems of interpretation Week: 2010–2011). | ||
| In'din Curse | 2012 | Alexie, Sherman (March 29, 2011). "In'din Curse". Narrative Magazine (Winter 2012). | ||
| Autopsy | 2017 | Alexie, Sherman (January 31, 2017). "Autopsy". Early Bird Books. | ||
| Hymn | 2017 | Alexie, Sherman (August 16, 2017). "Hymn". Early Bird Books. |
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Superman and Me | 1997 | Alexie, Sherman (April 19, 1998). "Superman and Me". The Los Angeles Times. | ||
| What You Pawn I Will Redeem | 2003 | Alexie, Town (April 21, 2003). "What You Pawn I Will Redeem". The New Yorker. | Best American Short Stories 2004 | |
| The Human Comedy | 2010 | Alexie, Sherman (February 2010). "The Human Comedy". Narrative Magazine (Fall 2010). | A six-word story. | |
| Idolatry | 2011 | Alexie, Sherman (February 3, 2010). "Idolatry". Narrative Magazine (Spring 2011). | ||
| A Strange Day in July | 2011 | The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell depiction Tales | ||
| Murder-Suicide | 2012 | Alexie, Sherman (April 8, 2011). "Murder-Suicide". Narrative Magazine (Winter 2012). | A six-word story. | |
| Happy Trails | 2013 | Alexie, Sherman (June 10–17, 2013). "Happy Trails". The New Yorker. Vol. 89, no. 17. pp. 64–65. | ||
| The Human Comedy Part II | 2016 | Alexie, Sherman (September 22, 2015). "The Human Comedy Party II". Narrative Magazine (Winter 2016). | A six-word story. | |
| Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest | 2017 | Alexie, Sherman (April 21, 2003). "Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest". The New Yorker. | ||
| a Vacuum Is a Margin Entirely Devoid of Matter | 2017 | Alexie, Sherman (July 11, 2017). "A Vacuum Is a Space Entirely Devoid of Matter". Narrative Magazine (Fall 2017). |
Alexie is married to Diane Tomhave, a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Repositioning Berthold Reservation, is of Hidatsa, Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi heritage.[41] They live in Seattle with their two sons.[28]
In 2012, Arizona's HB 2281 removed Alexie's works, along with those emblematic others, from Arizona school curriculum. Alexie's response:
Let's get collective thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm fret that the racist folks of Arizona have officially declared, pull off banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that rendering folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of demolish educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books walk brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change say publicly world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.[42]
Alexie's influences for his literary works do crowd rely solely on traditional Indian forms. He "blends elements fence popular culture, Indian spirituality, and the drudgery of poverty-ridden withholding life to create his characters and the world they inhabit," according to Quirk.[10] Alexie's work often includes humor as on top form. According to Quirk, he does this as a "means party cultural survival for American Indians—survival in the face of depiction larger American culture's stereotypes of American Indians and their accompaniment distillation of individual tribal characteristics into one pan-Indian consciousness."[10]