William Pitt Root

William Pitt Root is at home wandering the San Juan and Weminuche Wilderness with his wolf dog Mojo Buffalo Buddy. His first fifteen poetry collections reflect a life active both within and without academia teaching, first at Slippery Rock University, then as far from academia as it gets—in a factory outside of Stockton, California, as a bouncer in the Sweet Chariot Bar in Seattle, in a copper mine, and in the bilge of an oil tanker. He has taught as a Poet-In-Schools to children on five Native nations as well as in public schools in southern states. For twenty years, Bill taught creative writing and Native American Literature at Hunter College in Manhattan. From 1995-2002 he served as first Poet Laureate of Tucson, Arizona. His work appears in The NYer, Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares and in other journals and anthologies. Recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, NEA, Stanford University and US/UK Exchange Artists Program, Root’s recent books are Strange Angels and Sublime Blue, Translations of the Odes of Pablo Neruda. He is a poetry editor at Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts. He divides his time between Bayfield, Colorado and Tucson, Arizona, where he lives with his wife, the better poet, Pam Uschuk.

Praise for William Pitt Root

To read these poems is to cup a breath in your hands. Within the breath are fervent promises of remembrance whispered from the wheel of death, marriages, birth—out of fury and love.

—Joy Harjo, First Indigenous Poet Laureate of the United States

His poems, as quiet and knowledgeable as boulders, are run with compassion and longing. . .they break winter’s back.

—Barry Lopez, author of Of Wolves and Men, Horizon, and Arctic Dreams

“The Unbroken Diamond” is an extremely strong piece of work. . .this country needs badly. As fast as I know you are the only poet in the whole U.S. who had heart enough to address this subject (the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan). Your lines. . .surely redeem this nation.

—Joseph Brodsky, Russian dissident poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature