Orlando White is originally from Tolikan, Arizona. He is Navajo of the Zuni Water's Edge Clan and born for the Mexican Clan. He holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown University. His poems have appeared in Bombay Gin, Ploughshares, Salt Hill Journal, They Are Flying Planes, and are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review and Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. He has taught and been a visiting writer at Brown University, Colgate University, and the summer writing program at Naropa University. Currently he is teaching at The Art Center Design College and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Books by Orlando White:

Other poems on the web by Orlando White:
Three poems

About Bone Light:

"Orlando White's poetry glimmers with Diné notions of “thought creating thought” while re-configuring saad (language) into floating archipelagos of states which mutate into flashes of images that compel and startle. His work then peels forth a new perception of what language might be if we eliminate our own desires to maintain stasis in a changed world. Bone Light is an occasion marking the illumination of the body’s silence, the blank areas in which our breathing shadows the stains of letters punched onto the surface of a blank page, where the poet pages back a blank sound, filling it with the 'open dark' as he 'amputates one letter to fix another' so that we too may be changed in act of the recoding of language."
—Sherwin Bitsui

"Orlando White's Bone Light recreates poetry from the molecular level. His vision presents language letter by letter: as body, as recipe, as originary myth, as admonition. Here, poetry moves stealthily through the smallest increments, in the "pause between ink and letter when words are silent, unclothed." In that bare space, poems keep time through their own arcane measure and the reader sees a "human clock" emerge, one whose face is as much halo as empty zero. This astonishing writing dissects language with surgical and magical precision. White peels back our assumptions like a skin and gives us the irradiated, irreducible light of the bone."
—Elizabeth Robinson