Alexie, Sherman (1966-…), is an author whose writings reflect his experiences as a Native American in a white world. Alexie combines oral storytelling traditions with established literary forms to create realistic but often humorous pictures of Native American life.
Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr., was born on Oct. 7, 1966, in Spokane, Washington. He grew up as a member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Alexie received a B.A. degree from Washington State University in 1991 and began his literary career with two collections of poems, The Business of Fancydancing and I Would Steal Horses (both 1992). Later collections include One Stick Song (2000) and Faces (2009). His short stories have been collected in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), Ten Little Indians (2003), War Dances (2009), and Blasphemy (2012). Alexie also co-wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals (1998), a motion picture based on one of his stories.
Alexie’s first novel was Reservation Blues (1995). Flight (2007) is a time-travel novel about a half-Native American, half-Irish teenage boy. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) is an autobiographical novel for young adults about a teenager who leaves his reservation to attend an all-white school. The picture book Thunder Boy Jr. (2016) is also an autobiographical story, about a Native American boy who is named after his father and feels that he is growing up in his father’s shadow. The book was illustrated by the Mexican-born children’s author and illustrator Yuyi Morales. Alexie published You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a memoir centering on his relationship with his mother, in 2017.
In 2018, Alexie was accused of sexual harassment by several dozen women. He apologized that he had “done things that have harmed other people” but denied some of the accusations. The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), a tribal college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, removed his name from a scholarship named in his honor. Alexie had helped establish a graduate program in creative writing at the IAIA in 2013.
