Arizona have officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.}} Influences Alexie's writings are meant to evoke sadness, but at the same time, he uses humor and pop culture that leave the readers with a sense of respect, understanding, and compassion. Alexie's influences for his literary works do not rely solely on traditional Indian forms. He "blends elements of popular culture, Indian spirituality, and the drudgery of poverty-ridden reservation life to create his characters and the world they inhabit," according to Quirk. Alexie's work is laced with often startling humor. According to Quirk, he does this as a "means of cultural survival for American Indians—survival in the face of the larger American culture's stereotypes of American Indians and their concomitant distillation of individual tribal characteristics into one pan-Indian consciousness." Awards and honors 1992 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship 1993 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction for the story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven1994 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award 1996 American Book Award (Before Columbus Foundation) for Reservation Blues Granta Magazine: Twenty Best American Novelists Under the Age of 40 New York Times Notable Book for Indian Killer People Magazine: Best of Pages 1999 The New Yorker: 20 Writers for the 21st Century 2001 PEN/Malamud Award 2007 National Book Award, Young People's Literature, for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian2009 American Library Association Odyssey Award as the year's "best audiobook for children or young adults", read by Alexie (Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, LLC, 2008, ) 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for War Dances Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award Puterbaugh Award ", the first American Puterbaugh fellow California Young Reader Medal for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian2013 The John Dos Passos Prize for Literature See also List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas Louise Erdrich Native American Renaissance Native American studies There There (novel) References Other sources Alexie, Sherman; Bill Clinton and Jim Lehrer. "A Dialogue on