And now I'm going to move on to our next reader.
It's interesting because Sherwin and I were reading together
in Colombia.
And when we got there, some very interesting things
occurred with some of the other native writers,
which were very moving for both of us and also very compelling.
And Sherwin was with me.
He had originally been invited to read
for the festival at that time.
And they asked him if there was somebody else
he wanted to have read, or bring along,
or somebody else who was willing to come,
and he suggested that I would be.
And of course I said, Yes, I will go.
I like to travel to begin with.
I'm especially interested in Colombia.
And Sherwin is a wonderful poet and human being,
so I was happy to travel along with him.
And we were both reading, all these fantastic things
occurred.
And during the course of that experience
I got a call from Oregon State University
and they asked me to guest edit the international journal
To Topos.
Winona LaDuke had just guest edited a first edition for them
the year before and she suggested
that I could do a conglomeration volume from United States
and Canada.
Well we were in Colombia and I suggested that maybe we should
just do the Western hemisphere.
And so they agreed and we got about 350 pages
done for that international journal in about
a year and a half time.
And I realized during the making of that,
that we could sustain that movement a bit longer,
and work with people a little more
closely, and create an anthology that would have
shelf life beyond a magazine.
So the seed work started then, six years ago,
when Mariah was reading.
And we mentioned that her son was
14 at the time when the poetry was collected.
I was able to save roughly a third of the original work
to start as the starter for the soup that
became this volume later.
And Sherwin has been in that mix all the way through.
He was there at the beginning and has
stuck with the entire process in numerous ways.
Sherwin is originally from White Cone, Arizona
on the Navajo Reservation.
He, at the time of his contribution,
was living in Tucson, Arizona.
He's now living in Albuquerque.
He is Diné, of the Bluewater Clan and born for the Many
Goats Clan.
He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian
Arts Creative Writing Program and completed his studies
with a bachelor's here at the University of Arizona.
He's a recipient of the 2000-2001 Individual Poet Grant
from the Witter Bynner Foundation For Poetry.
A 1999 Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship at IAIA.
I think Orlando got one of those too.
It wasn't in his pile, right?
Perhaps.
Truman Capote?
Yes.
[LAUGHS] He's nursing a sore throat.
He's a Lannan Foundation Marfa resident, two time.
He might be one of the hand-- maybe three people, I think,
have done those twice and Sherwin's one of those.
And won a 2006 Whiting Writer's Award.
His books include Shapeshift and Flood Song,
which was a winner of a American Book Award
and an Open Book Award with PEN.
And with that, please join me in welcoming fantastic
poet and human being, Sherwin Bitsui.
[APPLAUSE]