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October 14, 2009
Sherwin Bitsui to Read from New Book of Poetry at IAIA
Contact:
Jon Davis, 505.424.2365
jdavis@iaia.edu
The public is invited to attend a reading by poet Sherwin Bitsui on October 29, 2009 beginning at 7:00 p.m. Bitsui will be reading from Flood Song, his new book of poetry (Copper Canyon Press). The reading will take place at the Library and Technology Center auditorium on IAIA campus, 83 Avan Nu Po Road, Santa Fe, NM. The event is free of charge and everyone is welcome.
Native traditions rub up against contemporary urban life in Flood Song, a painterly sequence populated with wrens and reeds, bricks and gasoline. While Bitsui is at the forefront of a new generation of Native writers who resist being identified solely by race, he does comes from an indigenous family, so Flood Song is filled with allusions to Dine myths, customs, and traditions. Highly imagistic and constantly in motion, Flood Song draws upon medicine songs, contemporary language and poetics.
Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona (on the Navajo Reservation) and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is Dine of the Todich'ii'nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl'izilani (Many Goats Clan). He holds an AFA degree in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Bitsui has received the 2000-01 Individual Poet Grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency and more recently, a 2006 Whiting Writers’ Award. His poems have been published in American Poet, The Iowa Review, Frank (Paris), Lit Magazine, Narrative and elsewhere. Bitsui’s poems were also anthologized in Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. He authored a book of poems titled Shapeshift in 2003 (University of Arizona Press). New Mexico magazine has called Bitsui's poetry “elegant, probative, and original.”
For more details about this event please call Jon Davis at 505.424.2365. For more information about IAIA, including directions to the campus, please visit www.iaia.edu.
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IAIA’s Mission:
To empower creativity and leadership in Native arts and cultures through higher education, lifelong learning and outreach
Click here to download full press release in PDF format.
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