Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She is only the second poet to be appointed a third term as U.S. Poet Laureate. Harjo began writing poetry in response to Native empowerment movements.
Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, including her most recent, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (2022), and the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise (2019), which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner. Her first memoir, Crazy Brave, was awarded the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Non Fiction and the American Book Award, and her second, Poet Warrior: A Memoir, was released from W.W. Norton in Fall 2021.
She has published three award-winning children’s books, and several screenplays and collections of prose interviews, and edited several anthologies.
Harjo performs with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics Band, and previously with Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice. Harjo is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and is a founding board member and Chair of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She has recently been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, the National Native American Hall of Fame, and the National Woman’s Hall of Fame. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma where she is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence of the Bob Dylan Center.
Learn more about Joy and her work at joyharjo.com
