Sherman Alexie

Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr., born 1966 in Wellpinit on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state, is an American writer of Spokane and Coeur d'Alene descent who works in poetry, short fiction, novels, and screenplays. He was born hydrocephalic, underwent brain surgery as an infant, and grew up reading widely in the small reservation library.

He left the reservation high school for Reardan High School off the reservation, then studied at Gonzaga University and Washington State University, where he began writing seriously under the poet Alex Kuo. His first major books, the poetry collection The Business of Fancydancing and the linked story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, both appeared in 1993 and drew critical attention to a new generation of Native American writing.

Alexie adapted stories from the second of those books into the screenplay for Chris Eyre's 1998 film Smoke Signals, the first feature film written, directed, and co-produced by Native Americans to receive wide theatrical release in the United States. His novel Reservation Blues appeared in 1995, and his young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, published in 2007, won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and has been frequently both taught and challenged in American schools.

His memoir You Don't Have to Say You Love Me was published in 2017. The same year he was the subject of public sexual-harassment allegations from several women writers, which he partly acknowledged and which led him to withdraw from public events.

Sherman is an English occupational surname meaning shearer of cloth, used as a masculine given name; he carries the masculine form.