Sherman Alexie’s poetry career started on a high note in his early twenties and has continued to rise. His first book, The Business of Fancydancing (Hanging Loose Press, 1992) was reviewed on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review: “Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time,” the reviewer wrote. Alexie had already won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a stream of other awards has followed – the PEN/Hemingway Award, the American Book Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the American Library Association Odyssey Award, to name a few-culminating with a National Book Award for his superb novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. He has written poetry, novels, short stories, screenplays – 24 books to date – and that doesn’t include a huge amount of literary and political journalism. He is a platform performer of enormous popularity. For all his success in every literary form he has tried, Alexie defines himself first and foremost as a poet.