Winner of the 2010 PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction, ‘War Dances,’ is collection of both stories and poems published in 2009 by Grove Press.
Born hydrocephalic in 1966, Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. At 6 months, he underwent brain surgery and was not expected to survive. However, he beat the odds and later studied to be a doctor. But after fainting in anatomy class, he changed his career paths by stumbling into a poetry workshop. The rest, as they say, is history.
Both heartbreaking and hilarious, ‘War Dances’ tells the stories of ordinary men and women on the brink of exceptional change. Jan Stuart of The New York Times wrote “Alexie’s appealing collection of short stories, poems and self-interrogations opens with an attempted murder and closes with an epitaph. Mortality is much on the mind of this puckish writer, who continues to sift common truths through the sieve of his Indian identity, albeit with the alacrity of a man barreling away from his youth…”
In addition to offering a one-unit book discussion classes, both schools are incorporating the book and its themes into this year’s curriculum and collaborating with the local native community and the county library on events.
For more information about the CR/HSU Book of the Year program, visit http://www.redwoods.edu/events/book-year/ or https://library.humboldt.edu/war-dances.