About Sherwin Bitsui
Originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, Sherwin Bitsui is the author of three collections of poetry: Flood Song (Copper Canyon), Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press) and The Next Sky (2026, Copper Canyon Press). In this new collection, Bitsui ruminates on humanity's past, present, and future. From fragmented and surreal, to haunted and intimate, poems navigate ideas of culture and identity through explorations of land, place, and nature. As coyotes bleed, birds harmonize, and the sun beams, Bitsui questions where every living being fits into the puzzle of the natural world. Here, the ancient and timeless collide with modern and temporal. “insisting: dusk is just skin / worn on faces," Bitsui affirms that beauty is an inevitability of living.Bitsui is a Navajo writer and poet. His book, Flood Song, was published in 2009 and won an American Book Award in 2010 and the PEN Open Book Award. His most recent book of poetry, Dissolve, was published in 2018. Since 2013, he has served on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Sherwin has also published poems in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Lit Magazine, and elsewhere and were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas.
A common theme within Bitsui's poems is the exploration of different values, concepts and ideas become when experienced in Navajo as opposed to English. He currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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