By: Mary Ann Gwinn
SEATTLE (MCT) - Seattle author Sherman Alexie has won the National Book Award for his highly autobiographical novel for young people, ''The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.''
Alexie got the news the night of Nov. 14 at the awards ceremony in New York. He won for best book in the young people's literature category. In his acceptance speech, Alexie, an author of 19 books of fiction, poetry and essays, quipped, ''Wow ... I obviously should have been writing YA [young adult] all along.''
He credited Alex Kuo, a creative-writing teacher at Washington State University who gave him an anthology of American Indian writing. It helped persuade him to become a writer. ''I had never read words written by a Native American. The first one was a poem about frying baloney ... I grew up eating fried baloney. The other was a poem by Adrian Lewis, and the poem had the line, 'Oh, Uncle Adrian, I'm in the reservation of my mind.' I knew right then when I read that line that I wanted to be a writer. It's been a gorgeous and magnificent and lonely 20 years since then.''
''I am in post-traumatic shock-stress syndrome,'' Alexie said later. ''It's just astonishing. It's all because 27 years ago, I went up to my mom and dad and asked if I could leave the rez school, and they said yes.''
He thanked his wife, his two sons and his editor, ''who edited me, even though I can be an arrogant bastard.''
Read the full article here: http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096416191
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