Sherwin Bitsui



Sherwin Bitsui is a Native American poet.

Life
Bitsui is originally from Baaʼoogeedí (White Cone, Arizona), on the Navajo Nation. Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Navajo of the Todichʼíiʼnii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tłʼízíłání (Many Goats Clan).

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.

Shapeshift (2003) is his first book. In his second book of poetry, Floodsong (2009), Bitsui intones landscapes real and imagined, populated with the wrens, winds, and reeds of the high desert and constructed from the bricks and gasoline of the city.

Recognition
He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the recipient of the 2000-2001 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 more recently, a 2006 Whiting Writers' Award. His first book, Floodsong, won the American Book Award and the Pen Open Book Award.

Poetry

 * Floodsong. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2009.
 * Shapeshift. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2003.