2010 Lifetime Achievement Award

Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas

Press Release February 1, 2010

Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene) of Seattle, Washington, is the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award winner from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Mr. Alexie is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and film maker, and the author of more than twenty books. He was born on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington on October 7, 1966. He first attended Gonzaga University and then transferred to Washington State University, where he received a bachelor’s degree. His novels include Reservation Blues (1995), Indian Killer (1996), Flight (2007), and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), his collections of short stories include The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1994), The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), Ten Little Indians (2003), and War Dances (2009); books of poetry are The Business of Fancydancing (1992), I Would Steal Horses (1992), Old Shirts & New Skins (1993), First Indian on the Moon (1993), The Summer of Black Widows (1996), and The Man Who Loves Salmon (1998), and Face (2009); and the movies Smoke Signals (1998) and The Business of Fancydancing (2002). In a relatively short literary career, Mr. Alexie has received numerous awards: the O. Henry Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the National Book Award among them. He has also been named the 2010 Puterbaugh Fellow of the Puterbaugh Festival sponsored by World Literature Today at the University of Oklahoma.

Mr. Alexie, along with two past NWCA Lifetime Achievement Award-winners---Robert J. Conley and Jack D. Forbes---will be honored during the annual Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers/Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas gathering in Norman and Chickasha, Oklahoma, March 24-26. The winners of the 2008 and 2009 First Book Awards will also be honored.