Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. (born October 7, 1966) is a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-American novelist, short story writer, poet, and filmmaker. His writings draw on his experiences as an Indigenous American with ancestry from several tribes. He grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and now lives in Seattle, Washington. His best-known book is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), a collection of short stories.

In order to better his education, Alexie decided to leave the reservation and attend high school in Reardan, Washington. The school was twenty-two miles off the reservation and Alexie was the only Native American student. He excelled at his studies and became a star player on the basketball team, the Reardan High School Indians. He was elected as class president and participated as a member of the debate team.  His successes in high school won him a scholarship in 1985 to Gonzaga University, a Roman Catholic university in Spokane. Originally, Alexie enrolled in the pre-med program with hopes of becoming a doctor, but found he was squeamish during dissection in his anatomy classes. Alexie switched to law, but found that was not suitable, either. He felt enormous pressure to succeed in college, and consequently, he began drinking heavily to cope with his anxiety. Unhappy with law, Alexie found comfort in literature classes.  In 1987, he dropped out of Gonzaga and enrolled at Washington State University (WSU), where he took a creative writing course taught by Alex Kuo, a respected poet of Chinese-American background. Alexie was at a low point in his life, and Kuo served as a mentor to him. Kuo gave Alexie an anthology entitled Songs of This Earth on Turtle's Back, by Joseph Bruchac. Alexie said this book changed his life as it taught him "how to connect to non-Native literature in a new way". He was inspired by reading works of poetry written by Native Americans.  With his new appreciation of poetry, Alexie started working on what was published as his first collection, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, published in 1992 through Hanging Loose Press. With that success, Alexie stopped drinking and quit school just three credits short of a degree. However, in 1995, he was awarded a bachelor's degree from Washington State University.

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