Sherwin Bitsui
From NativeWiki
Sherwin Bitsui (b. 1975) is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Diné of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan).
He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and is currently completing his studies at the University of Arizona.
- "Upon a first reading, the sharp, vivid images of Bitsui’s poems appear to have some connection to surrealism. And one could argue that there is a deep current that connects him to Latin American surrealism, although he enriches and modifies it by drawing on the landscape of the Southwest and on images intimately connected with Native ritual and myth. His images oftentimes depict a world-out-of-balance. Indeed, his work struggles with the tension between Diné and English, between the desire to restore a balance with the natural world and the recognition of how ineluctable the forces of twentieth century technology are. In struggling to reconcile these opposing forces, his poems and prose poems enact a personal ceremony." -- Arthur Sze
Sherwin has published his 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. Shapeshift is his first book.
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[edit] Poems available online
[edit] Awards
Sherwin Bitsui is the recipient of the 2000-2001 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Residency Fellowship and more recently, a 2006 Whiting Writers’ Award.
[edit] Books
Shapeshift, University of Arizona Press.
