09-16-94 American Indian Writer Will Read From Work At OSU

AMERICAN INDIAN WRITER WILL READ FROM WORKS AT OHIO STATE

     COLUMBUS -- Sherman Alexie, an American Indian writer, will
read selections from his work Tuesday, Oct. 4, at 7 p.m. in the
Conference Theatre of the Ohio Union, 1739 N. High St. on The
Ohio State University campus.

     The performance is free and open to the public.  A reception
will be held immediately afterward.

     Alexie's appearance is co-sponsored by Retention Services in
Ohio State's Office of Minority Affairs, the American Indian
Council, and the Department of English.  The program is made
possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council and the National
Endowment of the Humanities.

     The event is an opportunity for the community to share a
unique perspective of the American Indian experience as presented
by this highly acclaimed young author.

     Alexie writes from his own experiences growing up on the
Spokane Indian Reservation.  His stories and poems are filled
with passion and affection, yet they echo the irony, anger and
pain of reservation life.  They vividly depict everyday life --
the alcohol, the children, car accidents, basketball games and
romances.   He describes the distances between people:  between
Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men
and women, and most poetically, between contemporary Indians and
the traditional figures from their past.

     At 28, he has acquired a remarkable literary reputation very
quickly.  He was first published in Hanging Loose magazine in
1990.  Since then, he has published more than 300 poems, stories
and essays in The New York Times Book Review, New York Times
Sunday Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Slipstream, ZYZZYVA,
Black Bear Review, Another Chicago magazine, Journal of Ethic
Studies, Caliban, Red Dirt, Blue Mesa Review, Jacaranda Review,
Kenyon Review and others.  He has been featured in Vanity Fair
and The New Yorker.

     Alexie's first book of poetry and short stories, The
Business of Fancydancing, was  selected as a "1992 Notable Book
of the Year" by The New York Times Book Review; and his second
collection, I Would Steal Horses was winner of Slipstream's fifth
annual Chapbook Contest in March 1992.  He was awarded a National
Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1992.  This year, he
won the Annual New Writer's Award from the Great Lakes Colleges
Association (GLCA) for a first book of fiction, The Lone Ranger
and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993).

     The New York Times Book Review described Alexie's work as
"...so wide ranging, dexterous, and consistently capable of
raising your neck hair that it enters at once into our ideas of
who we are and how we might be, makes us speak and hear his words
over and over, call others into the room or over the phone to
repeat them."

     Kirkus, in its starred review, said "irony, grim humor, and
forgiveness help characters transcend pain, anger, and loss while
the same qualities make it possible to read Alexie's fiction
without succumbing to hopelessness....  Forgiveness seems to be
the last moral/ethical value left standing: the ability both to
judge and love gives the book its searing yet affectionate
honesty."

     Alexie, a member of the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene tribal
nations, is from Wellipinit, Wash., on the Spokane Indian
Reservation.  He was educated at Gonzaga University in Pullman,
Wash.   He currently lives and works in Seattle, Wash.

                                #

NOTE TO REPORTERS AND EDITORS:  For more information or to
arrange an interview with the author, please contact Rebecca
Nelson or Marti Chaatsmith of Retention Services in the Office of
Minority Affairs, (614) 292-8732.


[Submitted by: REIDV  (reidv@ccgate.ucomm.ohio-state.edu)
               
Fri, 16 Sep 1994 10:43:23 -0500 (EST)]
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