Sherwin Bitsui

Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation. He is Diné of the Todích’ii’nii, born for the Tlizí-laaní. He received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a BA from the University of Arizona in Tuscon.

Bitsui is the author of Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2018); Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), which received a 2010 PEN Open Book Award; and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003).

Of his work, Joy Harjo says, “His poems are wide and deep arroyos and mesas of human perception, conceptual word paintings born of agony and joy.”

Bitsui is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship, a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

Bitsui teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in November 2019. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.