Alexie, who lives in Seattle, won a National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2007 and this week, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. He is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian who grew up on a reservation 50 miles northwest of Spokane. Severely ill as a child, he overcame his conditions and set out for a life of reading and writing. In high school he was the only Native American and became a scholar-athlete, later writing about those experiences in "True Diary."
Many of Alexie's works have been honored, including a story collection, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," which was a PEN/Hemingway Award winner for best first book of fiction. The attention led to a film, "Smoke Signals," which won two awards at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.
Alexie, who receives $15,000 for the PEN/Faulkner honor, will be saluted May 8 on the 30th anniversary of the program.
The other finalists -- Barbara Kingsolver, Lorraine M. Lopez, Lorrie Moore and Colson Whitehead -- will also be recognized.
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