- Born
- Birth nameSherman Joseph Alexie Jr.
- Height6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
- Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian born and raised in the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. His father held various jobs, including truck driver and logger and his mother was a social worker. Alexie was born hydrocephalic and underwent a brain operation at the age of 6 months, but was not expected to survive. When he did live, doctors predicted he would live with severe intellectual disability. Although spared this, he did suffer through seizures and bed-wetting throughout his childhood. Preferring to stay inside, he developed a love for reading, liking Steinbeck as a five-year-old. Alexie faced alcoholism for five years before becoming sober at 23. He graduated with honors from Reardan High, where he was the only Indian. Alexie planned to be a doctor until he "fainted three times in human anatomy class" and stumbled into a poetry workshop at Washington State University. He attended Gonzaga University in Spokane on a scholarship and graduated in American Studies from Washington State. Alexie received two prestigious fellowships and soon after cranked out eleven books, placing the number of his total pieces of work at over 300.
- IMDb mini biography by: Rani Gupta <whatitmeans@hotmail.com>
- SpouseDiane Tomhave(? - present) (2 children)
- Prefers the term "Indian," to "Native American"
- His short story, The Toughest Indian in the World, appeared in The New Yorker Magazine's "The Future of American Fiction" issue (June 21 & 28, 1999)
- Won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his first young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
- [when asked if he thought that his portraying Indians as likely to have alcohol problems in his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian played into stereotypes about Indians] Stereotypes? It's not a stereotype. Stereotype implies that it's not real, and it's absolutely real. On my reservation, in my family, alcoholism was epidemic. When you're talking about aunts, uncles, cousins; there are three of us, currently, who don't drink actively, out of hundreds of people. So anybody who thinks it's a stereotype, alcoholism among Native Americans, is a romantic fool.
- [in his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian] Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.
- I've spent very little time on my reservation in the last twenty years. Personally,there's too much pain.I actually think I'm more traditional as a writing nomad than people who never leave the reservation.
- When you're colonized, you end up exploiting your own spirituality. You're subject to so many negative stereotypes, you embrace the positive ones. Non-Indians love us in that way. They think we're all priests and healers. After generations of being reviled and dehumanized, to be thought of as magical is pretty seductive.
- Every reading I do, there's always some big Indian guy in the back row staring daggers at me. One guy in Montana said, 'You're a genius. You figured out what white people wanted, and you wrote it'. Yeah, that's exactly what I thought back in 1987. What's going to make me really economically successful? Poems about Indian guys. I'm a capitalistic genius.
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