Joy Harjo
Biography
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2024 Frost Medal, Yale's 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.
The author of ten books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, several plays, children's books, and non-fiction works, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Harjo delivered the 2021 Windham-Campbell Lecture at Yale, part of the virtual Windham-Campbell Prize Festival that year. That lecture was the basis for Catching the Light, published in 2022 by Yale University Press in the Why I Write series.
Her beloved poem, Remember, was illustrated as a children's book by Michaela Goade and received a 2024 American Indian Youth Literature Honor Award by the American Indian Library Association.
As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. She has edited three anthologies of Native literature, including When the Light of the World was SubÂdued, Our Songs Came Through — A NorÂton AntholÂoÂgy of Native Nations PoetÂry, Reinventing the Enemy's Language, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project.
She served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma.