Sherwin Bitsui

Sherwin Bitsui
Born 1975
Holbrook, Arizona
Occupation Writer, painter
Genre Poetry
Notable works Floodsong
Notable awards American Book Award;
PEN Open Book Award
Website
bitsui.com

Sherwin Bitsui (born 1974 Fort Defiance, Arizona) is originally from Baaʼoogeedí (White Cone, Arizona), on the Navajo Nation. His book, Floodsong, won the American Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award.

Life

He is Navajo of the Todichʼíiʼnii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tłʼízíłání (Many Goats Clan).[1]

He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the recipient of the 2000-01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Soul Mountain Residency, a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency Fellowship and a 2006 Whiting Writers' Award.[2] In 2012, he was honored with an NACF Artist Fellowship in Literature.[3] Since 2013, he has served on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program.[4]

Sherwin has published poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Lit Magazine, and elsewhere. His poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century.

Many of Bitsui's poems explore how different values, concepts and ideas become when experienced in Navaho as opposed to English.[5]

Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Selected works

Poetry

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sherwin Bitsui.
  1. Kenneth Lincoln (1 January 2009). Speak Like Singing: Classics of Native American Literature. UNM Press. pp. 291–. ISBN 978-0-8263-4170-9.
  2. "Sherwin Bitsui". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  3. "Sherwin Bitsui". Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  4. "MFA Faculty IAIA". Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  5. Elizabeth Delaney Hoffman (22 February 2012). American Indians and Popular Culture [2 volumes]. ABC-CLIO. p. 151. ISBN 978-0-313-37991-8.