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This interview offers a personal look into dealing with Alexie's life in school and dealing with family issues.

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American Indian author Sherman Alexie doesn't like the term "Native American." A poet, short-story writer, novelist and screenwriter, he rejects the name, saying that "native American" can mean anyone born in America. Correspondent Vicki Mabrey profiles the opinionated Alexie, who is both very angry and very funny.

Alexie has a novel take on why Indians lost out to Europeans. "White people did not defeat Indians in the war because you were better fighters. You were not better fighters...but the thing is you beat us because you kept showing up at dawn. What is that? It's Custer. Ahh, he better be bringing lattes," says Alexie, whose latest book is called The Toughest Indian in the World.

Alexie was in fine form on a book tour earlier this year.

On The Writer's Trail

Watch Web exclusive clips shot by 60 Minutes II.
The writer dispels some myths about Indians.

Sherman Alexie recites "Why We Play Basketball" in a poetry slam that he eventually won.

His mother reveals how family members and reservation residents feel about his writing in an interview with Vicki Mabrey.

"The mascot thing gets me really mad" Alexie says. "Don't think about it in terms of race. Think about it in terms of religion. Those are our religious imagery up there. Feather, the paint, the sun that's our religious imagery. You couldn't have a Catholic priest running around the floor with a basketball throwing communion wafers. You couldn't have a rabbi running around."

At home in Seattle, where he lives with his wife and 3-year-old son, Alexie is a serious writer. He's published two collections of short stories nine books of poetry, two novels and one screenplay - all by the age of 33.

Alexie injects realism into his writing about Indians.

"It's that whole 'corn pollen, four directions, Mother Earth, Father Sky' Indian thing where everybody starts speaking slowly, and their vocabulary shrinks down until they sound like Dick and Jane. And it's all about spirituality, and it's all about politics," he explains.

"So I just try to write about everyday Indians, the kind of Indian I am who is just as influenced by the Brady Bunch as I am by my tribal traditions, who spends as much time going to the movies as I do going to ceremonies," Alexie says.

"White people, you've brought us some really cool things," Alexie says. "The Internet almost makes up for that smallpox thing."

There's a lot of humor in his stories, but there's also anger.

"In high school I dated a white woman," he recalls. "She would come to visit me on the rez. And her dad, who was very racist, didn't like that at all. And he told her one time, 'You shouldn't go on the rez if you're white because Indians have a lot of anger in their heart.'"

"Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion," he says. "And I'm also very much the pacifist."

Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Wash. His parents and brother still live there. Growing up in a government-built house, there wasn't much money or much food, but there were donated books.

On the reservation, he and others would play cowboys and Indians because they were American, too, he says. Watching Westerns, he would root for John Wayne, he adds.

"I distinctly remember doing that because I didn't recognize those Indians; I wasn't those Indians; I wasn't running around in a loincloth. I wasn't vicious. I wasn't some sociopath with war paint." Alexie says.

"I was a bright kid on the rez who liked books and who knew even at a young age that he had to leave the reservation to make something of himself," he adds.

Alexie describes the local school as "really terible." In the sixth grade he found his mother's name on his textbook.

He knew that nearby was a good school and a completely different world.

"You go from a very anti-white place into a very anti-Indian place. Walking from this township into Johannesburg," he says.

Down the road at the white school, he was surprised to find acceptance. He became captain of the basketball team, the Rearden Indians, prom king and class president.

Alexie wants to shatter Hollywood's stereotypes of Indians as Tonto and the noble savage.

"That's so tiring. Who wants to be wise, you know? You get carpal tunnel syndrome from carrying the burden of your race," Alexie says. "I'd like to have villains. I'd like to have goofballs."

Alexie says he tried to do this with his film Smoke Signals. "One of the heroes was this geeky, androgynous, verbose, irritating Indian guy."

Smoke Signals was the first Indian-produced, Indian-directed and Indian-written feature film distributed by a major studio. It was Alexie's first foray into movies. He produced the film and wrote the screenplay.

In one scene a character based on Alexie's father gets drunk and leaves the family.

"I just remember how disappointed I would be when my dad would show up somewhere drunk," he says. "That's just heartbreaking."

He writes a lot about a son's relationship to his father: "My father is an amazing man," Alexie says. He characterizes his relationship with his father as "good when he wasn't drinking."

"He never was a violent drunk," Alexie says. "But he would leave; he would leave to drink. And he would leave on binges for days, and a few instances, for weeks. And until I was 12 or 13, I would literally cry myself sick when he was gone. So literally you hear of people dying of broken hearts."

"You can learn to compensate in all sorts of ways, and I have," Alexie says. "But it doesn't change the shape of a scar."

Alexie compensates in part by writing and doing readings. Both his mother Lillian and his father Sherman Sr., with whom he is reconciled, are often in the audience and often are the subjects of Alexie's wit.

Lillian Alexie says she's come to accept her son's revealing writings.

His mother reveals the writer wasn't that funny, though, when he was little. "No, he wasn't. He was very moody, very temperamental...and he isolated himself a lot," she says.

Did she worry about him? "No. I was drunk most of the time," she says.

His mother describes ho she feels about true family stories woven into Alexie's works. "When he talked about how I left him...in the car while I was in the tavern, brought cokes and chips out to him," she says. "I was angry that he dared do this."

"This did happen," she says. "Maybe because he was able to write about it and not stuff it he was able to get rid of his own addiction."

It's probably not surprising that this Indian kid who rooted for John Wayne became an alcoholic, too. In college, he was what he calls "a case-of-beer, fifth-of-tequila drunk."

For nine years now, he's been sober.

He points to his use of dreams: "I knew who I was going to be. I knew this is where I would end up," he says. "I didn't want to be another public-figure Indian who would break the hearts of other Indian kids by being drunk. Indian kids have seen enough...drunk Indian adults."

Whenever he can, Alexie spends time with Indian kids, pleading with them to avoid the fate of so many on the reservation and stay sober.

"Don't live up to your stereotypes," he says. "If you're drinking now, stop it. It's just stupid. 'Cause you're going to quit or you're going to die."

He prides himself on being a role model for young Indians, but Alexie is much more than that. He's a popular literary star, a dirt-poor, reservation Indian who left the reservation and fullfilled his dreams of making it in the world.

He says he is not surprised that he's gotten as far as he has with his writing. "I thought I had that combination of skills which was very conducive to being successful in the United States in the early 21st century," he says.

"I write well enough. I'm funny. I'm good in front of a camera," Alexie says laughing.

© MMI, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved

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American Indian author Sherman Alexie doesn't like the term "Native American." A poet, short-story writer, novelist and screenwriter, he rejects the name, saying that "native American" can mean anyone born in America. Correspondent Vicki Mabrey profiles the opinionated Alexie, who is both very angry and very funny.

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Official Website of the Spokane Indian Tribe

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Official Website of the Spokane Indian Tribe

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Our commitment is to provide our guests with a unique, memorable, and positive experience. Our vision is to achieve business success through integrity, effective leadership, and superior, personalized customer service.

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Spokane Tribe of Indians - Improving the lives of our Members

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Our commitment is to provide our guests with a unique, memorable, and positive experience. Our vision is to achieve business success through integrity, effective leadership, and superior, personalized customer service.

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This link from the poetry foundation tells about Alexie's life and approaches to his work.

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Sherman Alexie is a preeminent Native American poet, novelist, performer and filmmaker. He has garnered high praise for his poems and short stories of contemporary Native American reservation life, among them The Business of Fancydancing (1992), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven (1993), which won a PEN/Hemingway Award, and Smoke Signals (1998), a critically acclaimed movie based on one of Alexie's short stories and for which he co-wrote the screenplay. An acclaimed performer of his own work, Alexie held the World Heavyweight Poetry title for four years. He continues to perform many of his poems at poetry slams, festivals, and other venues, and has received praise for the energy and emotion he brings to his work.

A Spokane/Coeur d'Alene tribal member, Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. Alexie was born hydrocephalic and underwent an operation at six months of age; he was not expected to survive. Though he lived through the experience, he was plagued with seizures as a child and spent most of his childhood reading. In the eighth grade, he decided to attend Reardan High School, located twenty miles outside the reservation. His achievements in high school secured his admission to Spokane's Jesuit Gonzaga University in 1985, where he had a successful academic career but began to abuse alcohol. Alexie transferred to Washington State University in 1987 and began writing poetry and short fiction. In 1990 Alexie's work was published in Hanging Loose magazine, a success he has credited with giving him the incentive to quit drinking. He has remained sober ever since.

In his short-story and poetry collections, Alexie illuminates the despair, poverty, and alcoholism that often shape the lives of Native Americans living on reservations. His poems, novels and short stories evoke sadness and indignation yet also leave readers with a sense of respect and compassion for characters who are in seemingly hopeless situations. Involved with crime, alcohol, or drugs, Alexie's protagonists struggle to survive the constant battering of their minds, bodies, and spirits by white American society and their own self-hatred and sense of powerlessness. As Alexie asserted in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Native Americans "have a way of surviving. But it's almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins." While he depicts the lives of Native Americans who attempt to escape their situation through alcohol and other forms of self-abuse, Alexie's characters also access a mental, emotional, and spiritual outlet, which he refers to as "fancydancing."

A key characteristic of Alexie's writing is irony, and his dark humor is often buoyed by an exquisite sense of timing. His poetry collections The Business of Fancydancing and First Indian on the Moon (1993) expose the "fraudulent illusions that tempt us all in America today," noted Andrea-Bess Baxter in Western American Literature. Commenting on The Business of Fancydancing, Alexie's first published poetry collection, Leslie Ullman in the Kenyon Review wrote that the author "weaves a curiously soft-blended tapestry of humor, humility, pride 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." Such irony is also a major force in Alexie's prose, particularly his early short story collections, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist-Fight in Heaven and The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), which Ken Foster for the San Francisco Chronicle described as having a "consistently dark comic tone." In an interview Alexie commented on his progression from poems to short stories to novels as occurring "pretty naturally because...my poems are stories. It felt natural for me to evolve to a larger form. Not to say it wasn't difficult for me at first, though...I had this thing about going beyond one page, typewritten. I'd get to the bottom of a page and freak out, because I wouldn't know what to do next. But the stories kept getting bigger and bigger...They began to demand more space than a poem could provide."

Alexie was named to Granta's Best of Young American Novelists list in 1996. Editor Ian Jack said the judges had "liked his [Alexie's] work because it had something to tell us. Native American life, life on the reservation, is a pretty under-described experience." He added that "fiction, if it's any good, should persuade you of individual and inner lives. Alexie's book wasn't sanctimonious or pious or a piece of political pleading-it introduced you to characters who were native American and made them as complex and odd as everyone else." Alexie's early work was often described in such terms. Verlyn Klinkenborg noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that Alexie writes effectively for "a divided audience, Native American and Anglo. He is willing to risk didacticism whenever he stops to explain the particulars of the Spokane, and, more broadly, the Native American experience to his readers. But Alexie never sounds didactic. His timing is too good for that"; Abigail Davis in Bloomsbury Review declared that "this first novel by Sherman Alexie comes as close to helping a non-Native American understand the modern Indian experience as any attempt in current literature. The reader closes the book feeling troubled, hurt, hopeful, profoundly thoughtful, and somehow exhausted, as if the quest of the characters had been a personal experience."

But as Alexie's prose writing has matured, it has become less focused on exposing a uniquely Native American world to Anglo audiences. Ken Foster, in his review of The Toughest Indian in the World for the San Francisco Chronicle, described how the nine stories in the collection retrace Alexie's familiar territory of Native-white conflict without feeling "the need to instruct his readers in the details of contemporary American Indian culture, and why should he? The lives he portrays are so finely detailed." Eric Weinberger, in his review of Alexie's short story collection Ten Little Indians (2003), likewise noted that the "the most successful stories in Ten Little Indians don't traffic in their Indianness." Alexie's 2007 novel Flightalso treads his familiar themes in new ways. In the story of 15-year-old foster kid "Zits," his adventures through time, and his reincarnation as various historical characters, Alexie "skillfully explores both sides of the proverbial war. Zits witnesses brutal violence through the eyes of whites and Indians, fathers and sons, and he begins to understand what it means to be the hero, the villain and the victim," wrote S. Kirk Walsh in his review for the New York Times. Released the same year, Alexie's semi-autobiographical young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian received major critical praise and won a host of awards, including the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Alexie has also been active in film, helping to create the first all-Indian movie. Smoke Signals (1998) which was a major studio release, writing and directing the adaption of his own book The Business of Fancy-Dancing (2003), and writing the script for the independent film 49? (2003). Based on an Alexie short story, Smoke Signals was produced, directed, and acted by Native American talent. The plot follows a young man living an aimless life in Idaho. Victor Joseph, who has lost contact with his Native roots, embarks on a journey to "discover his past and accept his present," as Los Angeles Magazine writer James Greenberg put it. The finished film took top honors at the Sundance Film Festival; on the occasion of its 1998 wide release, Alexie told a Time interviewer that he hoped Smoke Signals would open doors for Indian filmmakers. He pointed to African-American director Spike Lee as a role model: "Spike didn't necessarily get films made as much as he inspired filmmakers to believe in themselves. That's what's going to happen here. These 13-year-old Indian kids who've been going crazy with their camcorders will finally see the possibilities."

While he explores many of the same themes in all his chosen genres, Alexie's poetry is arguably even more self-conscious and ironic than his prose. A mix of narrative, formal innovation and gorgeous lyricism, his poetry collections often contain extended prose pieces, as in The Business of Fancy-Dancing, First Indian on the Moon (1993), and One Stick Song (2000), which Publisher's Weekly praised for its "ability to handle multiple perspectives and complex psychological subject matter with a humor that feeds readability." His collection Face (2009) includes poems written in forms like the sestina and villanelle, as well meta-textual effects like extended footnotes and frame-breaking moments of self-awareness. The effect, according to Stephen Ross in the Oxonian Review, is "light-hearted without being light, colloquial without being cliché, and serious without being sententious."

Alexie has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 2009 Mason Award, the 2008 Stranger Genius Award, a Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and numerous honorary degrees. He is a highly sought-after public speaker and has been a guest on nationally-broadcast radio and TV programs like the McNeil-Lehrer Report, NOW with Bill Moyers, and the Colbert Report. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife and two sons.

[Updated 2010]

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Sherman Alexie is a preeminent Native American poet, novelist, performer and filmmaker. He has garnered high praise for his poems and short stories of contemporary Native American reservation life, among them The Business of Fancydancing (1992), The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven...

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Choose one or more of these stories to identify thematic ideas!

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Fixed Income

When I landed the McDonald’s job, I was surprised to learn that I was the only teenager. I thought fast food was the only place where teenagers could get jobs. But most of the workers were college students or college-effing-graduates. One of the cooks has an Electrical Engineering degree. And he’s using all that science education to make sure there are two pickles, and only two pickles, on the hamburgers.

I don’t mean to make fun of my co-workers. They’re mostly cool. I’m angry at this effing country for making these adults work at McDonald’s. The woman who works the drive-through is a forty-five-year-old single mother and has three kids. How the hell does she pay for anything with her McDonald’s wages?

And don’t think it’s an accident that 99% of my co-workers are Black and Latino. I’m Native American and I’m pretty dark for a mixed-blood urban Indian. The only thing white in this McDonald’s are the effing vanilla milkshakes.

Sometimes, I feel guilty that I have this job. There might be other mothers and fathers who need it. But it ain’t like my parents are rich. My Mom, the Indian, is an Academic Advisor at the University of Washington, and makes decent cash, but my Dad, the white guy, got laid off from Boeing two years ago and can’t get a job anywhere else. Sooner or later, he’s probably going to be making french fries alongside me.

I’m saving my money for college. I screwed off my first two years of high school, like too many Indians do, so I don’t have the grades for a four-year school. But Seattle has some awesome community colleges. I can kick ass in my studies there and earn my way into a university somewhere close to home.

These are desperate times, and I’m not as desperate as a lot of people, but I’m desperate enough to need this job.

There’s an elderly white man who works here. His reflexes are too slow to use any of the equipment, so he greets people at the door and clears and cleans tables.

He’s got a sharp mind, though. I like what he has to say. We take our breaks together. We put on coats to cover our McDonald’s polo shirts, walk a block, step into an alley, and smoke.

His wife died ten years ago.

“Old husbands aren’t supposed to live longer than old wives,” he said. “My wife should be the widow sitting with other old widows making fun of their dead husbands.”

He has a girlfriend, though. A few girlfriends, actually.

“When you’re a single man in the old folks home,” he said, “you spend a lot of time dancing with different women.”

“Dancing is what you geezers call it?” I said. “You’re, like, the oldest playboy in the world.”

After a few months of cigarette friendship, he asked me to call him Grandfather with a capital G.

“Isn’t that what you Indians call your respected elders?” he said. “Not grandpa or gramps or old man or geezer. It’s Grandfather like it was my royal name.”

All four of my grandparents, two Indian and two white, died before I was born, so I didn’t have any traditional elders. I needed a grandfather. I was hungry for a grandfather.

“Grandfather,” I said. “It’s time to go back to work.”

He smiled as big as I’d ever seen. He loved the respect. I loved respecting him. In this sad country, respect is the only thing most of us can afford.

***

Honor Society

On the mornings after house parties, I gather the empty, half-empty, and nearly full beer cans, empty them into the sink, crush them flat, and throw them into the bed of my grandmother’s truck.

She’s been dead for three years but it is still her truck. I’m only borrowing it from her ghost. It has over three hundred thousand miles on the odometer but I keep it running with tools, prayers, and hand-drum honor songs.

Way-ya-hey-ya, start, engine, start! Way-ya-hey-ya, don’t break my heart!

When the truck bed is filled with cans, I tie a sheet over them to keep them from flying out, and drive off my reservation into Spokane, Washington.

I’m seventeen but don’t have a driver’s license or even a learner’s permit. My family is poor and we can’t afford driver’s ed. And I can’t take the driving test if I haven’t passed driver’s ed. But I don’t need official approval to drive safely. I obey the speed limit, check my mirrors often, and keep both hands on the wheel.

Way-ya-hey-hey, go, go, little truck, speed along with skill and luck, way-ya-ho-hey.

Once in Spokane, I drive to the recycling center near the abandoned East Sprague Drive-In and sell my aluminum cans for fifty-five cents per pound. I’ve done the math:

1. I need to sell 818 pounds in order to make $450.

2. I need $450 in order to pay for the SAT prep course that guarantees I’ll raise my test scores by 20%.

3. In the competition to win scholarships and admission into great colleges, a great SAT score makes all the difference.

My parents live on government welfare and tribal charity. Their full-time job is sadness. Neither of them graduated high school and they haven’t lived anywhere but on our reservation. But, sober or drunk, they have always played hand-drums and sang the ancient and new songs:

Way-yay-hey-hey, I can’t win or lose, I got rez-rez-reservation blues, Ya-ya-hey-hey.

They have taught me to sing and drum. And though I don’t believe in God, I believe a beautiful song is approximately God. So I sing and drum with my mother and father. I sing with my tribe.

And I travel our reservation, by car and foot, to collect aluminum cans. Pound by pound, dollar by dollar, I am preparing myself for the test, for the most important questions of my life:

Complete the Sentence: When the Indian boy, poor and…, decided that he had to… his reservation, he felt…

1. suicidally depressed…escape…like he was trying to save his life

2. loyal to his tribe…remain on…that he had no other choice

3. very intelligent…help…that a college education was vital

4. devoted to his parents…abandon them and…like a traitor

5. ambitious…see the world beyond…elated and terrified

When I take that SAT, I will sing, if only in my imagination, because I can’t bring in my real drum. I will sing to lessen my fear. And I will sing about this crazy life:
Ya-ya-hey-hey, you can’t leave and you can’t stay, way-ya-hey-hey.
Ya-ya-hey-hey, you got too many questions too many days, way-ya-hey-hey.
Ya-ya-hey-hey. Should you hate? Or should you love? Way-ya-hey-hey.
Ya-ya-hey-hey. The answer is All of the Above. Way-ya-hey-hey.

***

Valediction

After school, after football practice, every day for three years, John and I walked to the grocery store in our little town and bought candy, potato chips, and soda pop. It was a ceremony. We said hello to the old couple who owned the store, stepped into the walk-in cooler, grabbed our cold drinks, paid for them and our other snacks, and headed to John’s house or mine, depending on what our parents were planning to cook for dinner.

It was an average life for two average kids.

But, one day, in November of our senior year, John and I, as usual, stepped into the cooler and grabbed our favorite cans of pop. But then we looked at each other and we both had the same thought. I don’t know why it happened. Without saying a word, John and I grabbed three six-packs of soda and stuffed them into our duffle bags. Carrying the carbonated loot, we paid for our usual junk food, walked to John’s house, raced into his bedroom and celebrated. We drank all that pop and got wound up and stupid on sugar and caffeine. We could have stolen beer but we were athletes. And jocks did not get drunk in our school.

The next morning, we met up before school, and vowed to never do it again. One time was kind of innocent, but more than that would be criminal.

But after practice that night, we did it again. Then again the day after that. We shoplifted for a week.

The thrill and guilt grew bigger each time.

We joked and laughed with the old people who owned the store. We paid for five bucks of snacks as we stole twenty more.

Then I couldn’t do it anymore.

“John,” I said. “We have to stop. We’re going to get caught. They’ll kick us off the team. They might throw us out of school.”

“Just one more time,” he said. “Come on, Pete. They’re too old to catch us.”

“I can’t do it, man.”

“You’ve always been a wuss.”

I walked home alone while John went to the store. I thought he might text or call me after he left the store. I didn’t hear anything from him.

When I got to school the next morning, I immediately heard the bad news. John had been caught shoplifting. I knew they’d wonder how I was involved. John and I went everywhere together.

Halfway through first period, I was summoned to the principal’s office. He was there with the superintendent, the school counselor, and the football coach. It felt like an interrogation.

“Peter,” the principal said. “I’m sure you know why you’re here.”

“Because of John,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Did you know what he was doing? Were you involved?”

I wanted to tell the truth. I knew that I should confess. But it felt like I’d destroy my life by admitting to the crime. I wondered if John had already told them that I’d stolen nearly as often as he had. Did he do the right thing?

“Pete,” the principal asked again. “Were you involved in this?”

“No, sir,” I said.

They all studied my face. They knew I was lying. They wouldn’t let me get away with it.

“Okay, Pete,” the principal said. “John already told us he did it alone.”

I could tell they hadn’t believed him, either. But there was nothing they could do. I hadn’t confessed and John had denied that I was a thief, too. He was kicked off the football team, sentenced to community service picking up litter around town, and was suspended from school for a month.

During that month, he and I didn’t see each other. We didn’t call or text. We’d been constantly together for years but things had changed. I don’t know why he didn’t contact me. But I was too ashamed to talk to him. I’d let him take all the punishment. I kept playing football. I didn’t have to scoop up dog shit while my classmates watched. I wasn’t suspended. And my reputation wasn’t ruined. I wasn’t branded as a good kid gone bad. In fact, some people thought John had betrayed me by shoplifting and nearly getting me into trouble.

When John came back to school, he wouldn’t look at me. And I wouldn’t look at him. This silence went on for the rest of the year. We ignored each other at our graduation ceremony. Our parents ignored each other, too.

Late that night, at a kegger down by the river, we stood at separate campfires. I didn’t drink anything. But he got really drunk. I was worried for him. He caught me staring. He threw his beer into the fire and staggered up to me.

He grabbed me by my shirt and shook me.

“You aren’t who I thought you were,” he said.

“Neither are you,” I said.

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Citation for Best First Fiction, and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, Sherman Alexie is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and performer. He has published 25 books including his first picture book, Thunder Boy Jr, and young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, both from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; What I've Stolen, What I've Earned, a book of poetry, from Hanging Loose Press; and Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories, from Grove Press. He has also published the 20th Anniversary edition of his classic book of stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Smoke Signals, the movie he wrote and co-produced, won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. A Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Alexie has been an urban Indian since 1994 and lives in Seattle with his family. More from this author →

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Saturday Rumpus Fiction: Three Short Stories by Sherman Alexie

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These are desperate times, and I’m not as desperate as a lot of people, but I’m desperate enough to need this job.