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WORK TITLE: For a Girl Becoming
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WEBSITE: http://www.joyharjo.com/
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC Jan 2023
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Publishers Weekly vol. 271 no. 7 Feb. 17, 2025, review of For a Girl Becoming. p. 49.
Kirkus Reviews Apr. 15, 2025, , “Garcia, Adriana M.: FOR A GIRL BECOMING.”.
Booklist vol. 121 no. 22 Aug., 2025. Baez, Diego. , “Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age.”. p. 23.
Publishers Weekly vol. 272 no. 33 Aug. 25, 2025, , “Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age.”. p. 105.
Kirkus Reviews Sept. 1, 2025, , “Harjo, Joy: GIRL WARRIOR.”.
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019 – 2022.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she left home to attend high school at the innovative Institute of American Indian Arts, which was then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. Harjo began writing poetry as a member of the University of New Mexico’s Native student organization, the Kiva Club, in response to Native empowerment movements. She went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teach English, Creative Writing, and American Indian Studies at University of California-Los Angeles, University of New Mexico, University of Arizona, Arizona State, University of Illinois, University of Colorado, University of Hawai’i, Institute of American Indian Arts, and University of Tennessee, while performing music and poetry nationally and internationally.
Harjo is the author of eleven books of poetry, including her most recent, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (2022), the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise (2019), which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association, and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. 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, including Remember, which received a 2024 American Indian Youth Literature Honor Award by the American Indian Library Association, and For a Girl Becoming, with Pura Belpré Award – winning illustrator Adriana Garcia; an illustrated poem with Mvskoke artist Dana Tiger, Washing My Mother’s Body; a poetry collaboration with photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom, Secrets From The Center of The World; an anthology of North American Native women’s writing, Reinventing The Enemy’s Language ; several screenplays and collections of prose interviews, including Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, A Play, which she toured as a one-woman show and was published by Wesleyan Press. A book of short essays, Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age, is out from W.W. Norton Fall of 2025.
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.
She is Executive Editor of the 2020 anthology When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project featuring a sampling of work by 47 Native Nations poets through an interactive ArcGIS Story Map and a newly developed Library of Congress audio collection.
Harjo’s awards and recognitions include the 2024 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, a Class of 2022 National Humanities Medal, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Americans for the Arts, a Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, a PEN USA Literary Award, the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize, two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her poetry is included on a plaque on LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans.
Harjo performs with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics Band, and previously with Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice. She/they have toured across the U.S. and in Europe, South America, India, Africa, and Canada. Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including Winding Through the Milky Way, for which she was awarded a NAMMY for Best Female Artist of the year. Her newest album, Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace, co-produced with esperanza spaulding, will be released Spring 2026 from Folkways.
Harjo served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and as a founding board member and Chair of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Native American Hall of Fame, and the National Woman’s Hall of Fame.
Harjo holds the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship from the Kettering Foundation, and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, several plays, children's books, and two memoirs; she has also produced seven award-winning music albums and edited several anthologies. Her many honors include the Ruth Lily Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joy Harjo
Harjo smiling, wearing traditional earrings
Born May 9, 1951 (age 74)
Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.
Pen name Joy Harjo-Sapulpa
Occupation Author, poet, performer, educator, United States Poet Laureate
Nationality Muscogee Nation, American
Education University of New Mexico (BA)
University of Iowa (MFA)
Genre Poetry, non-fiction, fiction
Literary movement Native American Renaissance
United States Poet Laureate
In office
2019–2022
Preceded by Tracy K. Smith
Succeeded by Ada Limón
Joy Harjo (/ˈhɑːrdʒoʊ/ HAR-joh; born May 9, 1951) is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms (after Robert Pinsky). Harjo is a seventh-generation Monahwee daughter (also known as "Menawa").[1] Additionally, Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation (Este Mvskokvlke) and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground).[2] She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
In addition to writing books and other publications, Harjo has taught in numerous United States universities, performed internationally at poetry readings and music events, and released seven albums of her original music. Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, and three children's books, The Good Luck Cat, For a Girl Becoming, and most recently, Remember (2023). Her books include Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light (2022), Catching the Light (2022), Poet Warrior (2021), An American Sunrise (2019), Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), Crazy Brave (2012), and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975–2002 (2004), among others.
She is the recipient of the 2024 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the 2023 Harper Lee Award, the 2023 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americans for the Arts, a 2022 Leadership Award from the Academy of American Poets, a 2019 Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers, the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship, among other honors.
In 2019, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has since been inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, the National Women's Hall of Fame, and the Native American Hall of Fame. She has also been designated as the 14th Oklahoma Cultural Treasure at the 44th Oklahoma Governor's Arts Awards. Harjo founded For Girls Becoming, an art mentorship program for young Mvskoke women and served as a Founding Board Member and Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation.[3]
Her signature project as U.S. Poet Laureate was called Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry; it focused on "mapping the U.S. with Native Nations poets and poems".[4]
Early life and education
Harjo at the Library of Congress, 2022
Harjo was born on May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.[2] Her father, Allen W. Foster, was an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Nation. Her mother was Wynema Baker Foster of Arkansas, who was of Irish, French, and Cherokee Nation descent.[5] Harjo has stated that her mother and her maternal grandmother were not enrolled.[6][7] Harjo is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Nation.[8] Harjo's work is heavily inspired by the creativity of her mother, aunts, and grandmother, as well as her culture. Her first poem was written when she was in eighth grade. [9] At the age of 16, Harjo attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, which at the time was a BIA boarding school, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for high school.[10][11] Harjo loved painting and found that it gave her a way to express herself.[12] Harjo was inspired by her great-aunt, Lois Harjo Ball, who was a painter.[13] Harjo enrolled as a pre-med student the University of New Mexico. She changed her major to art after her first year. During her last year, she switched to creative writing, as she was inspired by different Native American writers including Simon J. Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko. Her first book of poems, called The Last Song, was published in 1975.[14][15] Harjo earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1978.[16] She also took filmmaking classes at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.[17]
Career
Harjo taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts from 1978 to 1979 and 1983 to 1984. She taught at Arizona State University from 1980 to 1981, the University of Colorado from 1985 to 1988, the University of Arizona from 1988 to 1990, the University of New Mexico from 1991 to 1997 and later from 2005 to 2010, UCLA in 1998 and from 2001 to 2005, the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast Low Residency MFA Program from 2011 to 2012, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from 2013 to 2016, and University of Tennessee, Knoxville, from 2016 to 2018.[17] Her students at the University of New Mexico included future Congresswoman and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.[18]
Harjo has played alto saxophone with her band Poetic Justice, edited literary journals and anthologies, and written screenplays, plays, and children's books.[19] Harjo performs now with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with pulled-together players she often calls the Arrow Dynamics Band.
In 1995, Harjo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.[20]
In 2002, Harjo received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales[21].
In 2008, she served as a founding member of the board of directors for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation,[22] for which she serves as a member of its National Advisory Council.[23]
In 2008, Harjo had her poetry collection, She Had Some Horses, published first as a Norton paperback.[1]
Harjo joined the faculty of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January 2013.[24]
In 2016, Harjo was appointed to the Chair of Excellence in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.[25]
In 2018, Harjo was awarded a Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
In 2019, Harjo was appointed Board Chair for the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation.[3]
In 2019, Harjo was named the United States Poet Laureate. She was the first Native American to be so appointed.[26] She was also the second United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to serve three terms.[27]
In 2019, Harjo was appointed Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets.
In 2022, Harjo was appointed as the first artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In 2023, Harjo was awarded Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.[28]
Harjo has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, National Native American Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Literature and performance
Harjo has written numerous works in the genres of poetry, books, and plays. Harjo's works often include themes such as defining self, the arts, and social justice.[29]
Harjo uses Native American oral history as a mechanism for portraying these issues, and believes that "written text is, for [her], fixed orality".[30] Her use of the oral tradition is prevalent through various literature readings and musical performances conducted by Harjo. Her methods of continuing oral tradition include storytelling, singing, and voice inflection in order to captivate the attention of her audiences. While reading poetry, she claims that "[she] starts not even with an image but a sound," which is indicative of her oral traditions expressed in performance.[31]
Harjo published her first volume in 1975, titled The Last Song, which consisted of nine of her poems.[32] Harjo has since authored ten books of poetry, including her most recent, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years (2022), the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise (2019), which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner; Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association; and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. 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, was released from W.W. Norton in Fall 2021.[33][34]
She has published three award-winning children's books, The Good Luck Cat, For a Girl Becoming, and Remember; a collaboration with photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom; three anthologies of writing by North American Native Nations writers; several screenplays and collections of prose interviews and essays, and three plays, including Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, A Play, which she toured as a one-woman show and was published by Wesleyan Press.[33]
Harjo is Executive Editor of the anthology When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project featuring a sampling of work by 47 Native Nations poets through an interactive ArcGIS Story Map and a newly developed Library of Congress audio collection.[4][33]
Harjo's awards for poetry include a 2024 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, Yale's 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the 2022 Ivan Sandrof Liftetime Achievement Award from the National Books Critics Circle, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, a PEN USA Literary Award, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writers' Award, the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize, a Rasmuson US Artist Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her poetry is included on a plaque on LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans.[33]
Harjo is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2022, she was named the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center.[35]
Poetry
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Harjo's interest in the arts began fairly early.[36] As an adolescent, she started painting as a way to express herself. She attended school at the Institute of Native American Arts in New Mexico where she worked to change the light in which Native American art was presented. From there, she became a creative writing major in college and focused on her passion of poetry after listening to Native American poets. She began writing poetry at twenty-two, and released her first book of poems called The Last Song, which started her career in writing.[37] Harjo's third collection, She Had Some Horses, introduced multiple definitions to a variety of indigenous related animals. The main animal being the horses highlighted in the title of, She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s definition of horses is not basic but instead has such a deeper meaning. According to Harjo, horses not only had connections with her family but also are connected to the ancestors, and many other aspects of nature. In the introduction of Harjo’s book, she describes horses: “Horses, like the rest of us, can transform and be transformed. A horse could be a streak of sunrise, a body of sand, a moment of ecstasy. A horse could be all of this at the same time. Or a horse might be nothing at all but the imagination of the wind” (Harjo x).[1] Harjo’s definition of horses is therefore less of an animal definition and more of a perception of spirits including the ancestors. One example that includes the spirit of ancestors in horses is the link that Harjo’s dad had with horses. In the introduction of Harjo’s book, She Had Some Horses, Harjo states “My father’s side of the family is inextricably linked with horses... He could speak with them. And he also knew how to bend time. He could leave for a destination by horseback at the same time as his cohorts, then arrive at his destination long before it was physically possible to arrive” (Harjo ix).[1] Based on the information in this quote it can be estimated that Harjo’s dad had a connection with the ancestor spirits that lived in his horses, which in return gave him the ability to travel faster than his companions. Her most recent collection, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light (W.W. Norton 2022) celebrates Harjo's 50 years of writing poetry since her first publication.
Harjo standing
Harjo photographed by the Library of Congress in 2019, upon her nomination as Poet Laureate
Music
Harjo plays the saxophone at the Library of Congress in 2019
As a musician, Harjo has released seven CDs. These feature both her original music and that of other Native American artists.[38]
Since her first album, a spoken word classic Letter From the End of the Twentieth Century (2003) and her 1998 solo album Native Joy for Real, Harjo has received numerous awards and recognitions for her music, including a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the year for her 2008 album, Winding Through the Milky Way. I Pray for My Enemies is Joy Harjo's seventh and newest album, released in 2021.[39]
Harjo performs with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with pulled-together players she often calls the Arrow Dynamics Band. She has performed in Europe, South America, India, and Africa, as well as for a range of North American stages, including the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the Cultural Olympiad at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, DEF Poetry Jam, and the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington D.C.[33]
She began to play the saxophone at the age of 40. Harjo believes that when reading her poems, she can add music by playing the sax and reach the heart of the listener in a different way. When reading her poems, she speaks with a musical tone in her voice, creating a song in every poem.[40]
Activism
In addition to her creative writing, Harjo has written and spoken about US political and Native American affairs. She is also an active member of the Muscogee Nation and writes poetry as "a voice of the Indigenous people".[41]
Harjo's poetry explores imperialism and colonization, and their effects on violence against women. Scholar Mishuana Goeman writes, "The rich intertextuality of Harjo's poems and her intense connections with other and awareness of Native issues- such as sovereignty, racial formation, and social conditions- provide the foundation for unpacking and linking the function of settler colonial structures within newly arranged global spaces".[42]
In her poems, Harjo often explores her Muskogee/Creek background and spirituality in opposition to popular mainstream culture. In a thesis at Iowa University, Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza writes about Harjo: "Native American continuation in the face of colonization is the undercurrent of Harjo's poetics through poetry, music, and performance."[43] Harjo's work touches upon land rights for Native Americans and the gravity of the disappearance of "her people", while rejecting former narratives that erased Native American histories.[43]
Much of Harjo's work reflects Creek values, myths, and beliefs.[43][44] Harjo reaches readers and audiences to bring realization of the wrongs of the past, not only for Native American communities but for oppressed communities in general. Her activism for Native American rights and feminism stem from her belief in unity and the lack of separation among human, animal, plant, sky, and earth.[45] Harjo believes that we become most human when we understand the connection among all living things. She believes that colonialism led to Native American women being oppressed within their own communities, and she works to encourage more political equality between the sexes.[46]
Of contemporary American poetry, Harjo said, "I see and hear the presence of generations making poetry through the many cultures that express America. They range from ceremonial orality which might occur from spoken word to European fixed forms; to the many classic traditions that occur in all cultures, including theoretical abstract forms that find resonance on the page or in image. Poetry always directly or inadvertently mirrors the state of the state either directly or sideways. Terrance Hayes's American sonnets make a stand as post-election love poems. Layli Long Soldier's poems emerge from fields of Lakota history where centuries stack and bleed through making new songs. The sacred and profane tangle and are threaded into the lands guarded by the four sacred mountains in the poetry of Sherwin Bitsui. America has always been multicultural, before the term became ubiquitous, before colonization, and it will be after."[47]
Awards and recognition
In 1995, Harjo received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of The Americas.[20] She is the recipient of the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award.[48] In 2012, she was inducted into the Mvskoke Creek Nation Hall of Fame.[49][50]
In 2013, Harjo received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Crazy Brave.[51] Crazy Brave also won the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction that same year.[48]
In 2014, she won the Black Earth Institute Award.[52] Harjo was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2014.[53]
She won the Wallace Stevens Award in Poetry by the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors in 2015[54] and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings was shortlisted for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.[55]
Harjo won the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize[56] and the 2019 Jackson Prize, Poets & Writers.[57]
She won the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Literary Award in 2019[58] and was named the United States Poet Laureate that same year.[10][59]
Harjo won the Oklahoma Book Award for An American Sunrise in 2020.[60] She was awarded the PEN Oakland 2021 Josephine Miles Award for When the Light of the World WasSubdued Our Songs Came Through.[61] Harjo received the 31st Annual Reading the West Book Award for Poetry for When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through in 2021.[62]
She was an inductee into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2021[63] and an inductee into the Native American Hall of Fame that same year.[64]
In 2021, Harjo was designed as the 14th Oklahoma Cultural Treasure at the 44th Oklahoma Governor's Arts Awards.[65]
She received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.[66] In 2024, Harjo was given the Lumine Lifetime Achievement Award by the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma[67]
She received an honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from the University of St Andrews in 2024.[68] Harju was named the Hemingway Distinguished Lecturer at The Community Library in 2024.[69] She received a Kettering Foundation Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship in 2025.[70]
Harju is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Department of Literature;[71] the American Philosophical Society;[72] the American Academy of Art and Sciences;[73] and the Academy of American Poets.[74]
Harjo's poetry is included on plaque of LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans[75]
Personal life
In 1967 at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Harjo met fellow student Phil Wilmon, with whom she had a son. Their relationship ended by 1971. In 1972, she met poet Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo tribe, with whom she had a daughter.[76] She raised both her children as a single mother.[77]
Harjo is married to Owen Chopoksa Sapulpa, and is stepmother to his children.[78][79][80]
Works
Bibliography
Poetic works
The Last Song, Puerto Del Sol, 1975.
What Moon Drove Me to This?, I. Reed Books, 1979, ISBN 978-0-918408-16-7.
Remember, Strawberry Press, 1981.
She Had Some Horses, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983, ISBN 978-1-56025-119-4; W. W. Norton & Company, 2008, ISBN 978-0-393-33421-0.
Secrets from the Center of the World, University of Arizona Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-8165-1113-6.
In Mad Love and War, Wesleyan University Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-8195-1182-9.
Fishing, Ox Head Press, 1992.
The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, ISBN 978-0-393-03715-9.
A Map to the Next World, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, ISBN 978-0-393-04790-5.
How We Became Human New and Selected Poems: 1975–2001, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, ISBN 978-0-393-32534-8.
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015, ISBN 978-0-393-24850-0. (shortlisted for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize)
An American Sunrise: Poems, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, ISBN 978-1-324-00386-1
Weaving sundown in a scarlet light : fifty poems for fifty years. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. 2023. ISBN 978-1-324-03648-7. OCLC 1294289380.
As editor
Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America, W.W. Norton & Company, 1998, ISBN 978-0-393-31828-9.
When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, W.W. Norton, 2020, ISBN 978-0393356809
Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, W.W. Norton, 2021, ISBN 978-0393867916
Plays
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses, Wesleyan University Press (published 2019), January 25, 2019, ISBN 978-0819578655
Non-fiction
The Spiral of Memory: Interviews. Poets on Poetry. University of Michigan Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0472065813.
Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo. Wesleyan University Press. 2011. ISBN 978-0-8195-7151-9..
Crazy Brave: A Memoir. W. W. Norton & Company. 2012. ISBN 978-0-393-07346-1..
Poet Warrior. W.W. Norton. 2021. ISBN 978-0393248524..
Catching the light. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2022. ISBN 978-0-300-25703-8. OCLC 1310155936.
Children's literature
The Good Luck Cat, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000, ISBN 978-0-15-232197-0.
For a Girl Becoming, University of Arizona Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8165-2797-7.
Remember, National Geographic Books, March 21, 2023, ISBN 978-0-593-48484-5
Discography
Solo albums
Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century (2003)[81]
Native Joy for Real (2004)[82]
She Had Some Horses (2006)[83]
Winding Through the Milky Way (2008)[84]
Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears (2010)[85]
I Pray For My Enemies (2021)[86]
Singles
This America (2011)[87]
Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice
Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century (1997)
Joy Harjo
http://www.joyharjo.com
B. 1951
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Image of Joy Harjo
© Karen Kuehn. Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts.
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She earned her BA from the University of New Mexico and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Harjo draws on First Nation storytelling and histories, as well as feminist and social justice poetic traditions, and frequently incorporates indigenous myths, symbols, and values into her writing. Her poetry inhabits landscapes—the Southwest, Southeast, but also Alaska and Hawaii—and centers around the need for remembrance and transcendence. She once commented, “I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings. In a strange kind of sense [writing] frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to; it is my survival.” Her work is often autobiographical, informed by the natural world, and above all preoccupied with survival and the limitations of language. She was named U.S. poet laureate in June 2019.
A critically-acclaimed poet, Harjo’s many honors include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award. She has received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. In 2017 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry.
In addition to writing poetry, Harjo is a noted teacher, saxophonist, and vocalist. She performed for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and currently tours with Arrow Dynamics. She has released four albums of original music, including Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears (2010), and won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. She has been performing her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, since 2009 and is currently at work on a musical play, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented. She has taught creative writing at the University of New Mexico and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana and is currently Professor and Chair of Excellence in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Harjo is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.
Harjo's first volume of poetry was published in 1975 as a nine-poem chapbook titled The Last Song. These early compositions, set in Oklahoma and New Mexico, reveal Harjo’s remarkable power and insight into the fragmented history of indigenous peoples. Commenting on the poem “3 AM” in World Literature Today, John Scarry wrote that it “is a work filled with ghosts from the Native American past, figures seen operating in an alien culture that is itself a victim of fragmentation…Here the Albuquerque airport is both modern America’s technology and moral nature—and both clearly have failed.” What Moon Drove Me to This? (1980), Harjo’s first full-length volume of poetry, appeared four years later and includes the entirety of The Last Song. The book continues to blend everyday experiences with deep spiritual truths. In an interview with Laura Coltelli in Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, Harjo shared the creative process behind her poetry: “I begin with the seed of an emotion, a place, and then move from there… I no longer see the poem as an ending point, perhaps more the end of a journey, an often long journey that can begin years earlier, say with the blur of the memory of the sun on someone’s cheek, a certain smell, an ache, and will culminate years later in a poem, sifted through a point, a lake in my heart through which language must come.”
Harjo’s collections of poetry and prose record that search for freedom and self-actualization. In books such as She Had Some Horses (1983; reissued 2008), Harjo incorporates prayer-chants and animal imagery, achieving spiritually resonant effects. One of Harjo’s most frequently anthologized poems, “She Had Some Horses,” describes the “horses” within a woman who struggles to reconcile contradictory personal feelings and experiences to achieve a sense of oneness. The poem concludes: “She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she hated. / These were the same horse.” As Scarry noted, “Harjo is clearly a highly political and feminist Native American, but she is even more the poet of myth and the subconscious; her images and landscapes owe as much to the vast stretches of our hidden mind as they do to her native Southwest.” Indeed nature is central to Harjo’s work. The prose poetry collection Secrets from the Center of the World (1989) features color photographs of the Southwest landscape accompanying Harjo’s poems. Praising the volume in the Village Voice, Dan Bellm wrote, “As Harjo notes, the pictures ‘emphasize the “not-separate” that is within and that moves harmoniously upon the landscape.’“ Bellm added, “The book’s best poems enhance this play of scale and perspective, suggesting in very few words the relationship between a human life and millennial history.”
Harjo’s work is also deeply concerned with politics, tradition, remembrance, and the transformational aspects of poetry. In Mad Love and War (1990) relates various acts of violence, including the murder of an Indian leader and attempts to deny Harjo her heritage, explores the difficulties indigenous peoples face in modern American society. The second half of the book frequently emphasizes personal relationships and change. Leslie Ullman noted in the Kenyon Review, that “like a magician, Harjo draws power from overwhelming circumstance and emotion by submitting to them, celebrating them, letting her voice and vision move in harmony with the ultimate laws of paradox and continual change.” Highly praised, the book won an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. In her next books such as The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994), based on an Iroquois myth about the descent of a female creator, A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales (2000), and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2002), Harjo continues to draw on mythology and folklore to reclaim the experiences of native peoples as various, multi-phonic, and distinct. Using myth, old tales and autobiography, Harjo both explores and creates cultural memory through her illuminating looks into different worlds. As poet Adrienne Rich said, “I turn and return to Harjo’s poetry for her breathtaking complex witness and for her world-remaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous.” In recent collections of poetry and prose Harjo has continued to “expand our American language, culture, and soul,” in the words of Academy of American Poets Chancellor Alicia Ostriker; in her judge’s citation for the Wallace Stevens Award, which Harjo won in 2015, Ostriker went on to note that Harjo’s “visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing.”
Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave (2012) won the American Book Award and the 2013 PEN Center USA prize for creative nonfiction. In an interview with Jane Ciabattari, Harjo discussed the meaning of her last name (“so brave you’re crazy”) and her work’s attempt to confront colonization. “Who are we before and after the encounter” of colonization, Harjo asked. “And how do we imagine ourselves with an integrity and freshness outside the sludge and despair of destruction? I am seven generations from Monahwee, who, with the rest of the Red Stick contingent, fought Andrew Jackson at The Battle of Horseshoe Bend in what is now known as Alabama. Our tribe was removed unlawfully from our homelands. Seven generations can live under one roof. That sense of time brings history close, within breathing distance. I call it ancestor time. Everything is a living being, even time, even words.” Harjo’s other recent books include the children and young adult’s book, For a Girl Becoming (2009), the prose and essay collection Soul Talk, Song Language (2011), and the poetry collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Consistently praised for the depth and thematic concerns in her writings, Harjo has emerged as a major figure in contemporary American poetry. While Harjo’s work is often set in the Southwest, emphasizes the plight of the individual, and reflects Creek values, myths, and beliefs, her oeuvre has universal relevance. Bellm asserted: “Harjo’s work draws from the river of Native tradition, but it also swims freely in the currents of Anglo-American verse—feminist poetry of personal/political resistance, deep-image poetry of the unconscious, ‘new-narrative’ explorations of story and rhythm in prose-poem form.” According to Field, “To read the poetry of Joy Harjo is to hear the voice of the earth, to see the landscape of time and timelessness, and, most important, to get a glimpse of people who struggle to understand, to know themselves, and to survive.”
Harjo told Contemporary Authors: “I agree with Gide that most of what is created is beyond us, is from that source of utter creation, the Creator, or God. We are technicians here on Earth, but also co-creators. I’m still amazed. And I still say, after writing poetry for all this time, and now music, that ultimately humans have a small hand in it. We serve it. We have to put ourselves in the way of it, and get out of the way of ourselves. And we have to hone our craft so that the form in which we hold our poems, our songs in attracts the best.”
Joy Harjo poet laureate icon
1951 –
United States Poet Laureate, 2019–2022
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Joy Harjo was appointed the United States poet laureate in June 2019, and is the first Native American poet laureate in the history of the position. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 9, 1951, Harjo is a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She received a BA from the University of New Mexico before earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1978.
Harjo is a poet, musician, and playwright. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years (W. W. Norton, 2022); An American Sunrise (W. W. Norton, 2019); The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (W. W. Norton, 1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; and In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award.
Harjo is also the author of two memoirs: Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age (W. W. Norton, 2025) and Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton, 2012), which won the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction. Harjo has also published collections of interviews and conversations, collaborative art texts, and children’s books, including For a Girl Becoming (Norton Young Readers, 2025).
In 2015, she received the Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry from the Academy of American Poets. About Harjo, Chancellor Alicia Ostriker said:
Throughout her extraordinary career as poet, storyteller, musician, memoirist, playwright and activist, Joy Harjo has worked to expand our American language, culture, and soul. A Creek Indian and student of First Nation history, Harjo is rooted simultaneously in the natural world, in earth—especially the landscape of the American southwest—and in the spirit world. Aided by these redemptive forces of nature and spirit, incorporating native traditions of prayer and myth into a powerfully contemporary idiom, her visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing.
Also a performer, Harjo plays saxophone and flutes with the Arrow Dynamics Band and solo, and previously with the band Poetic Justice. She has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam in venues across the U.S. and internationally and has released four award-winning albums. In 2009, she won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year.
In 2015, Harjo gave The Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics, which is offered annually in New York City by a prominent poet, called “Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets.” Her other honors include the 2024 Frost Medal, the 2019 Jackson Poetry Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and the 2022 Academy of American Poets Leadership Award in Poetry. In 2023, Harjo was announced as the fifty-third winner of Yale’s Bollingen Prize for Poetry for Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years and for her lifetime achievement in and contributions to American poetry. She has also received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 2019, Harjo was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. On this occasion, Academy Chancellor Marilyn Chin said:
[Joy] is an iconic and beloved multi-genre artist. Her poetry, prose, and music have delighted, informed, and tantalized an international audience for over four decades. Her poetry displays a strong commitment to her social and political ideals as she fights tirelessly for Native American justice, ending violence against women, and a variety of important issues. Her masterful spiritual grace always shines through with compassion and forgiveness. Her poetry is a timeless gift to the world.
In addition to having served as U.S. poet laureate, Harjo has directed For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for young Mvskoke women, and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She was the Guest Editor for Poem-a-Day in April 2020 and was appointed Bob Dylan Center Artist-in-Residence in 2022. Harjo lives in Tulsa.
Former Poet Laureate Joy Harjo Reveals Her Wisdom for Weathering Today's 'Perfect Storm' in Girl Warrior (Exclusive)
The poet and author's newest memoir is geared toward anyone in transition, even just from one day to the next
By Lizz Schumer Published on October 6, 2025 04:53PM EDT
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Joy Harjo attend The Double Helix of Song and Poetry: Two Forms Intertwined during AMERICANAFEST 2025; Girl Warrior On Coming of Age by Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo and 'Girl Warrior'.
Credit : Erika Goldring/Getty for Americana Music Association; W. W. Norton & Company
NEED TO KNOW
Joy Harjo's newest book, Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age, is a lyrical, inspiring guide to surviving transitional periods
While it was written with young women in mind, the poet and author explains how it's helpful for anyone facing a precipice
Girl Warrior comes out Oct. 7
Joy Harjo has served three terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate; written 12 books of poetry, several plays, children's books and memoirs; recorded seven albums — one forthcoming co-produced with Esperanza Spalding — and she's not even close to finished. After all, there are so many stories left to be told and more coming every day.
The Muskogee Nation writer's new book, Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age (out Oct. 7 from W. W. Norton), addresses a transitional period in all of our lives. “To know ourselves is the most profound and difficult endeavor," Harjo writes. "Though we are all made of the same questions, we have individual routes to the answers, or to reframing the questions ... Why are we here? What are we doing here? What happens after death? Does anything mean anything at all? Who am I and what does it matter?”
Joy Harjo Americans for the Arts 2022 National Arts Awards, Guastavino's, NYC, Manhattan, New York, United States - 17 Oct 2022
Joy Harjo in 2022.
Neil Rasmus/BFA.com/Shutterstock
While the poet and author, 74, acknowledges that most of us think about the period between childhood and adulthood as the book's titular coming-of-age — and the book did start as a guide for young people, girls in particular — that adolescent cusp is far from the only time in a person's life when they may find themselves at a crossroads. This book, she explains, can serve as a guide to all of them.
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"It seems like we're always coming of age," she tells PEOPLE. "We always have moments of coming of age in our understanding, and as we grow knowledge ... But there's also marriage, there's divorce, there's falling in love, out of love, there's cultural shifts. For example, political shifts and so on are coming, so the book ends up having a larger scope."
In Girl Warrior, Harjo shares stories about her own coming of age as well as those of her ancestors, to "bring renewed attention to the pivotal moments of becoming, including forgiveness, failure, falling, rising up and honoring our vast family of beings." The book emphasizes the importance of artistic endeavors like painting, poetry and music as "a means of inviting the past into the present and a critical tool." Art-making, she argues in this and many of her other works, isn't an idle fascination with beauty. It's essential for humanity.
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Joy Harjo
In putting together the essays that comprise Girl Warrior, Harjo found herself struck by the stories we tell each other, and the means by which they're shared and how generations can pass on their wisdom to help the next. "There's groups of young people getting together and reading, or reading aloud," she explains. "I think there's a move towards that, because the spirit hungers. We're physical creatures, even as we're spirits and bodies, we are still mammals."
"Everybody, everyone has a story. And, you know, all of our stories together make a generation," she adds. "The stories of a generation are part of the ongoing story that will continue to unfold."
Girl Warrior On Coming of Age by Joy Harjo
'Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age' by Joy Harjo.
W. W. Norton & Company
Those stories have perhaps never felt as important to Harjo as in the current moment, with the rise of generative AI and the social isolation wrought by COVID-19, climate change, as well as "the political divisiveness, rhetoric, false story and the rules of political office being disregarded," the poet continues. "Every generation says, 'Oh, these are unlike any other times,' but we are in a time of the perfect storm."
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Harjo's work, for which she has been awarded a National Humanities Medal among other honors, has always called for empathy, creativity and shared humanity. And she hopes this book will help readers lean into those virtues, as well as recognize the opportunity that lies in moments of transition, even from one day to the next.
"There's sunrise, and we wake up and we go through a day. We all do that. No matter where we are. We go through moon changes and shifts. That's a certain kind of ceremony," she says. "We need those markers, even during the day, to get up and acknowledge the gift. And at the end of the day, saying, the end of the day is good for letting things go."
Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age comes out Oct. 7 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
Joy Harjo on the Power of Poetry, and on Building a Comprehensive Canon of Indigenous Poems
by Clancey D'Isa
October 13, 2020
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“It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death. We sing our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren: our human experience in time, into and through existence.” So begins the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, the first comprehensive anthology of Native Poetry, edited by Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.
Included within this landmark anthology are hundreds of poems dating from the 17th century to the present, representing close to 600 Indigenous tribal nations in the United States mainland, Alaska, and the Pacific Island territories. The anthology’s historical and geographic arcs celebrate Indigenous poetry in all its forms—oratory, song, ritual—and bring together the lived and diverse histories of our nation’s first peoples.
I recently talked with Joy Harjo about her experience assembling this anthology, her hopes for the image of Indigenous poetry, and the value of poetry in the present.
Clancey D’Isa
This collection includes over 160 Indigenous poets, dating from the present back to the 17th century. It includes both written works and poems which have been traditionally delivered orally. Could you tell me a little bit more about the structure of the anthology?
Joy Harjo
The thought behind the structure of the anthology was to divide it by geographical areas, instead of by state. It would be difficult to divide it by tribal groups because we only originally were offered 300 pages for such an anthology. Even with the amount of pages we have now, a little over 400, the question still persists: how do you fit over 500 federally-recognized tribal Nation’s poetry into an anthology that size? That was the first challenge.
Then you have to decide, of course, how are we going to do this: will it be chronological by age? It was really important for us to make a point that our tribal nations are situated in very specific geographical environments, in specific geographical areas, with particular environments. Many of the pieces are located specifically in those places. Traditionally pieces belong to certain areas, in that they wouldn’t have come into being without being in certain areas. We decided to divide the anthology into five rough and inexact—nothing could be perfect—geographic areas. For the Muscogee peoples, our directions go East, North, West, South, and back around. We decided to let the Northeast and Midwest go first, and then we would come back around to the Southeast.
When you read the sections, you can also see and come to understand a certain sense of place. If you read a section from beginning to end, you can read how colonization moved in different ways.
Clancey D’Isa
The anthology’s structure supports a beautiful reading experience. Throughout the anthology, there are biographies of each poet before their poems. Could you tell me more about how you imagined those biographies informing the reader?
Joy Harjo
It is always important to give context in the midst of such a project. This is such a wide-ranging book of poetry, in terms of time, in terms of tribal nations represented, in terms of generations included. We felt that it was very important to preface each poem or section of poems with a little biographical statement, so that it would give at least a little bit of context to the poems which followed. Through reading, you may move from one tribal group to another, and the distinctions and histories are important. For instance, the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, and Alaska those areas cover miles and miles and miles. Each of those areas could have its own anthology. We could do a whole series—an Encyclopedia of Indigenous Poetry—because so much was left. We had to work within page parameters and there were many poets who were not included. We could have easily doubled the anthology.
Clancey D’Isa
You talked about the way you could track the movement of colonization through these poems. These poems trace many other things too: Indigenous traditions, blood politics, climate change, the genocide of Indigenous people, identity politics, and generational hope. As an editor, how did you approach such an expansive and historically significant project?
Joy Harjo
What makes this project unusual is that we decided that the panel of experts would consist solely of Native Poets. We had Assistant Editors who were students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where I was teaching at the time. I had two different classes who assisted with the basics of putting the anthology together. They got to be part of the process alongside the Native Poet Editors. We convened on Skype, in a time before Zoom, to discuss what would be included in the anthology.
There was a great joy, in all of us, in reading poetry. The opportunity to, one, see what was there and, two, to read, was a wonderful process. The email exchanges were also insightful and useful as we moved collectively through the editing process. I especially appreciated learning specifics of construction and meaning that were rooted in languages, and of experiences particular to geographies and tribal histories.
The last part of the process of editing was when the three editors—Leanne Howe, Jennifer Forrester, and I—decided to read aloud as part of the process for final editing before we sent the manuscript to Norton. To hear the introductions and poetry aloud was so powerful. Hearing edits and the final work are an important part of my revision process for all of my projects. That’s how I hear what I miss from seeing the writing on the page. It took us several hours to read the whole anthology. Often we were in tears, sometimes we laughed. Overall we were inspired at what our peoples had accomplished in their lives and in their poetry. We want people to see that we are human beings. We survived beyond the cavalry coming after us in the movies; we aren’t all Pocahontas; we are human beings and there is a range of experience and emotions in our lives. All kinds of experiences mirror this in this collection.
Clancey D’Isa
Your introduction sings of an American Poetry that, at its core, recognizes Indigenous Poetry. As you note there too, there cannot be an American poetry without Indigenous poets. What does this anthology do to further redefine the relationship between American Poetry and Indigenous Poetry?
Joy Harjo
There has never been a comprehensive anthology of Native Poetry. Some years ago, I edited a Norton anthology of contemporary Native Women Poets, but there has never been a comprehensive anthology of Native Poetry. That says: one, that there hadn’t been, with any of the major presses any such essential text; two, that there was a need for it. We do not see Native peoples represented in the American story usually except as primitives, those who were in the way of progress. We are not present in the American literary canon, rarely on the prize lists. Our stories of racial and cultural violence have been excluded from the urgent larger narrative in which we are currently engaged. We have been disappeared.
This Anthology reframes American Poetry to include Indigenous Poetry as necessary to American Poetry. The act of the book appearing, being present with over 400 pages of poetry that go back from time immemorial to the present does that work. We are poets, we have accomplished poets, and we had poets long before there was an entity called America. We were here, we are here, we didn’t disappear or die; but, we are living voices and we are poets.
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“Why do we fear the ghosts of women who were murdered? Why don’t we fear the thing that made them what they are?”: An Interview with Cynthia Pelayo
We’re crucial to the American story. There would be no America without Indigenous peoples. You cannot tell a story, whether it’s the story of American poetry or the story of American history or the story of American anything without the the contributions and presence of Indigenous peoples
Clancey D’Isa
How can poetry help us now?
Joy Harjo
Poetry holds a crucial role in society. Poetry can hold, in a very small container sometimes, what nothing else can hold. Poetry can hold grief so immense that there’s nothing else [that] can contain it; poetry can hold stories that are dense or unspeakable; poetry can hold joy and awe; poetry can hold the contradictory parts of ourselves, the contradictory parts of the country. Sometimes three or four little lines can hold a whole lifetime.
We can speak out in poetry in a way that allows people to hear multi-dimensionally. A poem can be constructed of many dimensions. Therein is the gift of metaphor. Collectively the arts are like that; but, poetry, because we’re humans and we speak, has that power. I’ve often wondered what role humans have on Earth—because there’s nothing that we appear to do that seems to regenerate the Earth. The only thing I can come up with is that we’re the story gatherers and the song makers. That’s our contribution.
Clancey D’Isa
What is your hope for this Anthology?
Joy Harjo
This Anthology, as comprehensive as it is, just barely touches on the wealth of Indigenous Poetry that exists. It is a thin slice of who we are. There are many, many, many more poets and many poets we couldn’t include. I hope this Anthology inspires people to listen, and that Native Poetry and Native Poets become included in the ongoing story of who we are as a nation and society of many.
Anthology
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through
Edited by Joy Harjo, with Leanne Howe, Jennifer Elise Foerster, and contributing editors
W. W. Norton and Company
Published August 25th, 2020
Interview: Joy Harjo
Cover of Joy Harjo's A Map to the Next World. Cover of Joy Harjo's Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. Cover of Joy Harjo's Crazy Brave.
Cover of Joy Harjo's How We Became Human. Cover of Joy Harjo's In Mad Love and War. Cover of Joy Harjo's She Had Some Horses.
In celebration of Indigenous People’s Day (October 8, 2018), we are happy to present this interview with Joy Harjo.
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation. She is the author of thirteen books—including poetry collections, children’s literature, and memoir—for which she has received numerous awards including the 2002 Pen/Open Book for A Map to the Next World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), the 1991 William Carlos Williams Award for In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan, 1990), and her second American Book Award for her memoir, Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). She is also a renowned saxophonist and vocalist.
Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:
The book that you’ve recently released, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings—what number of books is this for you?
Joy Harjo:
I think it’s the eighth poetry book, but I have other books. I have a memoir, two children’s books, a collaborative book with an astronomer, and CDs and music. So that’s the eighth poetry book.
TFR:
Do you find with each book you put them together a little bit differently, in how you approach the assembling in the order of the poems and . . .
Harjo:
Every one is different. It’s like children. [laughter] Yeah. Every one has its own story.
TFR:
Before the poems, you have these italicized sections in your books, and I was curious whether you wrote those after you put the poems in order, or if those were something that you already had that you worked in?
Harjo:
I worked those in to fit, because I’m a horn player too, so they’re like sax riffs. And I think all literature is essentially oral. So it’s another way that I have of saying, “Okay. Here, let’s do a little riff here. And a little riff here.” [laughter] I think most of those I wrote after assembling the poems.
TFR:
I went to your reading this morning, which was just lovely, and I was going to ask if you found it very different to read to poets versus to an audience that was there for music. But you started out with a poem that was very much a song, and I thought it’s kind of both. But do you approach different audiences differently, the poetry audience and the music audience?
Harjo:
I don’t know. I do what I do. I started playing horn when I was almost . . . when I was thirty. And I had been doing poetry for some time, and I already had a name in poetry, and I started adding music. And I thought, All of my poetry audience will come over to the music. But it’s not so. A lot of the poets say, “Well, we just want the poetry, straight. We don’t want anything with it.” And I have a whole music audience who, even though I’m using the poems, they don’t know anything about the poetry.
TFR:
So you find it’s very separated. Two different audiences that don’t have a lot of crossover?
Harjo:
Often, it is. I thought there would be a lot of crossover, and there’s some but not a lot.
TFR:
How does it feel different to be doing a spoken poem versus doing a song, and the feedback that you get from one group or the other?
Harjo:
I think I’ve always seen poetry as a matter of voice because of the way I came to it through my mother writing songs. To me, it’s pretty much the same voice. That’s what I’ve come to. There’s a voice in my saxophone voice, and if you hear my horn voice, my singing voice, the speaking voice, the poetry voice, it’s the same voice. It just expresses itself in different ways.
TFR:
When you edit your work, do you read the pieces aloud to check for the sounds?
Harjo:
I have to. [chuckle] I have to. That’s all part of it. I always tell that to my students: “Read them aloud.” And then there’s the next level of reading aloud. There’s reading aloud to yourself and, in a way, you can always find what’s knotted up or what’s not working. You can usually know, usually. But then, I have found there’s other levels of that, the next level is reading to someone else. Then you will hear more of what’s not working. But the biggest test is reading it to an audience. And I have made the mistake many times of reading new poems to an audience that are too fresh. And I’ll be up in front of the audience with a pen. I’ll make sure if I’m going to do that, I’ll take a pen, because then I hear right away what’s not working. [laughter]
TFR:
Do you find you get good edits out of that, even if you wished . . . you had saved it for later?
[laughter]
Harjo:
Yes, I do. You know how it is, you get so excited when you have a new poem and, then you want to read it, and I’ll have to tell myself, “Okay, just take some time with this.” Because you know, by now . . . if you don’t know by now, [laughter] then you should know by now that you’re going to be full of shame and horror the next day if you don’t let the poem have its time to settle.
TFR:
Have you had pieces that were published in, for instance, a literary magazine and then you put them in a book, and then you find yourself changing things prior to the publication of the second time or the third time?
Harjo:
Yes. One of the poems in Conflict Resolution, “Everybody Has a Heartache,” was published in Poetry Magazine for a Split This Rock conference. And I said, “It’s not ready.” They really liked the poem, the editor of that little section really loved the poem. I said, “But I know it’s not there yet.” But they wanted it anyway, so I gave it to them. So it’s much revised in the book. And even in the title poem, “Conflict Resolution,” there’s a whole section I would totally rewrite or take out.
TFR:
There was a lot of myth and cultural story woven into this book. And I taught history and English for many years, and as I was reading it, I kinda felt like I had done a disservice because of how little we talk about the stories of culture rather than just the history. Because it should be a part of history, and it’s often not. What do you feel is the importance of people’s individual stories?
Harjo:
History is stories. It’s just what’s called history is usually the old. I think the feminists came up with it, history meaning “his story.” And yet, ultimately, history is the stories of everyone who was there, including the plants, including the animals, including the rooms things happen in. [laugh] It’s all part of the story.
TFR:
Do you find that where you are writing influences what you are writing? If you’re home or if you’re traveling, do you find you come to different kinds of subject matter?
Harjo:
I’ve wondered about that. I remember when I moved to Hawaii for eleven years, and I had always wanted to be there, in the Pacific. I love the Pacific. But it was startling—even as much as I felt so at home and I loved the water and I got into outrigger canoe racing—that I had been so ingrained in the Southwest and Oklahoma where I’m from and that history. To move into another place was very difficult for my writing, at least for a while. A lot of the writing from that time . . . I don’t think is my best.
TFR:
Do you find that writing in the Southwest the landscape lends itself to being spare with words and conscious of every one?
Harjo:
I don’t know if it did that, but when I started writing I was learning the Navajo language. And I loved that . . . New Mexico, I went there to go to Indian boarding school and came back home for a little bit, for about a year or two, and then went back. But the poetry, the spirit of the poetry came to me there. And it’s so much a part of me. I miss it so much. I’ll be in Tuscon next week. I’m excited about that. But I really miss the Southwest. It’s very much a part of my poetry, as is the story of my people. As is Hawaii, the water and the spirit of the water, who is one of my biggest teachers. So, places do affect me. I travel. I’ve always been a traveler. Even as a child when we didn’t go anywhere, books were my means of traveling, as well as walking and trying. They gave me that sense of discovery, discovery of new places.
TFR:
You’ve talked about the importance of paying attention to the sunset and what you can let go at that time period. Do you feel like in your travels, you have to make a conscious effort to be aware of time and the sun and what’s going on outside of, maybe, the rooms that you’re in, more so than when you’re home?
Harjo:
Yes, they’re like markers. You realize we’re all in the ceremony of sunrise. I was watching the sun come up in my room . . . It was nice. I usually request a room that has an east view, but I didn’t and I had an east room anyway. What cracked me up is the guy said, “Oh yeah, and you have a balcony, too,” but my balcony looks out over a parking garage and the freeway. I didn’t get an ocean view with this trip. [laughter]
TFR:
Conflict Resolution for Human Beings includes this poem set in Vancouver about walkabout, and you had the dead umbrella and the broken wings. And as much as it’s hard to travel a lot, do you also find value in it, in that it brings you to pieces you might not have otherwise written?
Harjo:
Oh, sure. I think, I would say probably three-fourths. [chuckle] Most of those poems are set in places, like the one in British Columbia. One of the earlier ones, I’m in a hotel. Louis Armstrong’s band had been there, and the hotel had turned to trash, and yet the King of Jazz had been there. They resurrect . . . That’s one of the first little riffs that starts off the book. And, yeah, there’s a lot of horn, meeting horn players, out playing horn on the street. And even death appears. That’s a traveler. [laughter]
TFR:
Yes, yes, yes.
Harjo:
But, yes, there are also several poems in there about Hawaii, about Oklahoma. I get to travel quite frequently.
TFR:
So often when reading bios of you, they very much emphasize the history of and your role in Native literature in the US. Do you ever feel that it’s kind of a burden to be speaking, in some people’s minds, for a whole group of people as opposed to just for yourself?
Harjo:
I can’t think about that because I know that I don’t speak for anybody else. I just follow that voice that was given to me to take care of. So I can’t even speak on behalf of my family. [laughter] You know how most families are? Everybody’s so different. But it’s true that I have often been, through the years, the token or the person that’s speaking on behalf of anyone that’s not your all-American male. [laughter] So it’s an impossible situation, an even bizarre situation sometimes. And there are many Native writers and many Native poets who also have a place. They have a place, though a lot of people aren’t going for, or they don’t wind up in a large of an arena. Their poetry or their songs are very important at home, and that’s what’s important. It’s not about being at a big-book thing. One of the first times I went back to the ceremonial ground, and they have a speaker that goes around, and I remember when he came by my camp, he says, “And you can leave your university books, all of that behind because this is not the place for them.” It’s a different world. There’s literature there, and there’s a place. A different system.
TFR:
Do you find that the people in your life have a great awareness of you as a poet? Do you find that they have an expectation of not being included in a poem or being included in a poem?
Harjo:
I guess I don’t do a lot of using my poetry as a tool or wielding my poetry . . .
TFR:
Yeah. [laughter]
Harjo:
Not like a novelist or a . . . My memoir though, that was another story. But I don’t think they worry about it too much. And it was funny when I lived in Hawaii—people knew me as a canoe paddler, someone who paddled canoes, outrigger canoes, and they knew me. I remember going down to the Kapalama Post Office to mail out a box, and the woman looked at my name and she looked at me, and she says, “Oh, you’re the one that makes those really good cookies.” [laughter] So I thought, “Okay,” that’s what I was. People had no idea of my life as a poet.
TFR:
Do you find that when you were paddling, that that act of paddling, that the movement ever served to have words come to you that you would use later, that that was a meditative state? Or were you very much focused on just the paddling itself?
Harjo:
It’s kind of all of that. When you’re involved in an act that can be very strenuous, there’s different ones when you’re racing and then when you’re practicing. I almost said rehearsing. And then when you’re doing this practicing, you’re focused. You’re really focused. But there is something about the rhythm. And so much does come to you, even as so much falls away. And being out there at sunset or at sunrise is just incredible. And moving in a rhythm.
TFR:
Do you ever get on the water at night, after dark?
Harjo:
I have been, and it was kind of dangerous.
[laughter]
We were out one time with the canoe club with our group, and we went way out and we got in trouble because we were out near the lane where the ships were coming in, got beeped at. So then we were paddling back and it got dark, and it’s kind of . . . It’s cool, but then you can hear the wave action where you have to come in. And you have to know where to come in, and so that gets a little . . . dangerous. Maybe like poetry.
The First Native American U.S. Poet Laureate on How Poetry Can Counter Hate
4 minute read
“We need something to counter the hate speech, the divisiveness, and it’s possible with poetry,” says Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. poet laureate.
“We need something to counter the hate speech, the divisiveness, and it’s possible with poetry,” says Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. poet laureate.Shawn Miller—Library of Congress
By Olivia B. WaxmanAugust 22, 2019 6:11 AM EDT
Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. poet laureate, tells TIME about her new book, ‘An American Sunrise,’ and the state of poetry.
You found your voice as a poet in 1973, a time when a lot of Americans found theirs. How much was that a factor?
I didn’t set out to be a writer. I was shy, quiet, and I loved art because I didn’t have to speak with anyone. At one point, my spirit said, “You have to learn how to speak.” I think poetry came to me because there was a lot of change. In 1973, I was 23, a mother of two children, and I was in a very active Kiva club [that was raising awareness about Native American issues] during the native-rights movement. We were dispersed Americans, totally disregarded, and I felt our voices needed to be heard. I started writing poetry out of a sense of needing to speak not only for me but all Native American women.
What do people get wrong about Native Americans?
A lot of images [of Native Americans] are based on fairy tales or Wild West shows. We are human beings, not just people who have been created for people’s fantasy worlds. There’s not just one Native American. We’re diverse by community, by land, by language, by culture. In fact, we go by our tribal names, and there are 573 tribal nations.
Do you write every day?
I’m often writing something almost every day. I keep journals: one on the computer, one for dreams, one for general observations and overheard things, and one for learning jazz standards, so I look up the history of the song, then I rehearse it and make notes.
What time of day do you write best?
When the airwaves are clear, either really early–like 6 a.m., 7 a.m., before anything is said–or really late. It’s important to have a doorway open to the place without words, and that happens more easily when you’ve come from dreaming.
What advice would you give poets?
It’s about learning to listen, much like in music. You can train your ears to history. You can train your ears to the earth. You can train your ears to the wind. It’s important to listen and then to study the world, like astronomy or geology or the names of birds. A lot of poets can be semihistorians. Poetry is very mathematical. There’s a lot in the theoretical parts that is similar. Quantum physicists remind me of mystics. They are aware of what happens in timelessness, though they speak of it through theories and equations.
What history inspired An American Sunrise?
It came directly out of standing and looking out into the woods of what had been our homelands in the Southeast before Andrew Jackson removed us to Indian territory. I stood there and looked out, and I heard, “What did you learn here?”
What are your plans as the poet laureate?
I can remind people that they use poetry, go to poetry, frequently, and may not even know they are. A lot of song lyrics are poetry. They go to poetry for a transformational moment, to speak when there are no words to speak.
As a singer and saxophonist in the Arrow Dynamics Band, do you plan to incorporate music in the role?
I always play or perform music with my poetry. When poetry came into the world, it did not arrive by itself, but it came with music and dance.
How would you describe the state of poetry?
Audiences for poetry are growing because of the turmoil in our country–political shifts, climate shifts. When there’s uncertainty, when you’re looking for meaning beyond this world–that takes people to poetry. We need something to counter the hate speech, the divisiveness, and it’s possible with poetry.
Author Interview: Joy Harjo on Poetry & Picture Books
Home » Author Interview: Joy Harjo on Poetry & Picture Books
By AJ Eversole
Today on Cynsations I am thrilled to present an interview with former, U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. Her latest picture book, Remember (Random House Studio, 2023) released last week. Illustrated by Caldecott Medalist Michaela Goade, Remember, is a poem in picture book form.
What is the heart of Remember?
I used to ask this of my creative writing students when I taught. The heart of this poem can be found by the rhythm, the beat that runs through and is repeated in the word “Remember.” It pumps life in the poem. The driving force reminds us that are all connected and ultimately we are earth or Ekvnvcvke.
What do you think of children as an audience for poetry?
Children can be natural poets in that they naturally play with whatever materials are at hand. Word play is a given. They like ear surprises, respond to rhythm and music. They love poetry and when given a change to make their own poems are usually eager to participate.
Joy Harjo Headshot
Do children as an audience change the way you package or present a poem?
I think this depends on the age and the poem. I did not write the poem “Remember” specifically for children. The poem was in response to a request to write a poem to advise younger up-and-coming poets, when I was but a younger and up-and-coming poet myself. I wrote the poem in the seventies. It was published in my first book She Had Some Horses (W. W. Norton) which was published in 1981. I find that children and pretty sophisticated and appreciate authenticity. However, I would speak to a group of kindergartners much different that middle-schoolers. They are at different parts of the story.
Remember is one of your early poems. How has it been watching Remember grow a life of its own?
I would never have guessed that Remember would have such legs, such wings. To me, it was a humble poem, by a young Native poet trying to understand and work with this discipline, this art called “poetry.” I never planned to be a poet. And I had to find my own way. That’s the path of an artist.
Joy Harjo With Horse and Flute
Are there any other poems of yours you would like to see in picture book format?
I have several ideas for children’s books, and have a couple of ideas for a children’s book series. “Perhaps the World Ends Here” might make a good children’s book, though I’d have to revise a couple of lines.
Tell me about the collaboration process with Michaela Goade. How did you align your vision of the poem with her vision for the visual spirit of the work?
Michael Goade was my first choice as an artist. During our discussion about the art she said she could research my Mvskoke people’s culture, then she asked about the possibility of exploring the poem through her own Tlingit culture. I told her to go with what inspires her. And she did!
I had a wonderful mentor and friend from her culture, the poet and culture bearer Nora Dauenhauer. I like to think of this collaboration as an acknowledgement of our connection. The book is a bridge between families, and as the message of the poem reveals, ultimately we are all related.
SXSW With Michaela Goade
SXSW-EDU with Michaela Goade and Mandy Smoker.
Cynsational Notes:
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. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she left home to attend high school at the innovative Institute of American Indian Arts, which was then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school.
Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, including her most recent, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (W. W. Norton & Company 2022), the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association, and In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award.
Her first memoir, Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), was awarded the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Non Fiction and the American Book Award, and her second, Poet Warrior: A Memoir (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021). She has published three award-winning children’s books, Remember (Random House, 2023) The Good Luck Cat(Houghton Mifflin, 2000) and For a Girl Becoming (University of Arizona Press, 2009)
In addition to serving as a three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, 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.
March 27, 2023
Awards
Joy Harjo and Her Poetencies: An Interview with the 2022 NBCC Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner
By Ricardo Jaramillo
Joy at podiumThe 2022 National Book Critics Circle Awards, New School Auditorium, New York, New York, March 23, 2023. Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
When I began my conversation with Joy Harjo, I immediately recognized her cadence. It is a cadence I’d come to know and love via another form, from years of making company with her poems. It is a cadence scaffolded by reverence, by grace, and by a rigorous love for the world. Like any great poet, Joy Harjo’s cadence does not simply indicate her wisdoms; it constitutes them. I spoke with Harjo in the wake of her winning the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, a prize made to honor an individual’s contribution to the larger culture of books and language. We spoke over Zoom, with some final adjustments and amendments completed in writing. Below is a summation of our longer conversation–a conversation which staggered and wandered, like all speech that travels near to beauty:
You speak, often, of rituals. You’ve even claimed that “every poem is a ritual.” I wanted to ask you about your morning rituals. What rituals accompany your days and your poem-making?
My favorite ritual is to get up and acknowledge the sun and this life. Then I ask for help, in whatever I am doing. I like to get up while I’m still asleep and to stay in that mode–a liminal mode between dreaming and wake–and just write without thinking. Often, that earliest stuff is rich, rich with the deep earth, where there’s both coal and diamonds. I like to say I’m an early morning person and a late-night person–I can catch the writing wave on one side of that line or the other…
You play the saxophone, you paint, and you write poems. I wonder what you feel can only happen in a poem?
When you deal with the musicality of language, which includes rhythm, the sonics, meaning, architecture… I mean, you can’t get that anywhere else in quite the right manner. Poetry is a kind of distillation. I’ve said sometimes that everyone has their area of obsession; maybe every poem is like that. Maybe every poem has a heart. There must be a heart in there somewhere for a poem to live. I always come to poetry when I have no words, which is the great paradox of writing poetry. Poems map out mystery, using words, lines, phrases, sonics – in a manner unlike any other literary art.
We are speaking on the occasion of your winning the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. You are one of the most known and decorated living poets. But you are also a spiritual poet, with spiritual motivations. What is your relationship to recognition and accolade?
Well, I was young once, too, and I’ve learned some things along the way (laughs). Some of it I learned after long, long periods when I felt like I was writing well, but often felt that no one could see or hear me. We all go through testing periods like that. One thing poetry has taught me is that this is all a spiritual world, and poetry is the language of the spiritual world. We’re all in it. It’s the stuff of our poetry, it’s the stuff of our living. As far as accolades, well, this award from the National Book Critics Circle, it means a lot to me. I’ve been writing now for over fifty years, a relatively long time. I didn’t have early recognition. The delay was helpful in the long run because it taught me I am writing because I love language. I love to travel, and traveling means not just physically moving from one place to another, but traveling within the mind-realms, the spiritual realms. What I do does not depend on recognition or non-recognition. Ultimately, I was given something to do, and I want to do as best as possible. I am motivated by healing, and I am motivated by justice. I am motivated by what can happen in the creative story-field, in the creative poetry-field, or the creative song-field. That excites me. That’s worth the journey.
Former Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Toni Morrison once said: “We die, that may be the meaning of our lives. But we do language, that may be the measure of our lives.” Looking back on the lifetime(s) of your poems, what do you feel they measure or engage?
Maybe we poets engage directly with eternity. Some version of eternity. Time is staggered. Realms are staggered. I’ve learned that poems seem to ripen at different times. They all have their own lives. And sometimes they go live their lives elsewhere, without you. But that’s a beautiful thought from Morrison, I think it’s a characterization of poetry really.
What line of what poem could you never forget?
A lot of the poems come to mind. Of course there’s always, tiger tiger burning bright. There’s one must have a mind of winter, to regard the frost and the boughs…and have been cold a long time. Wallace Stevens, The Snowman, I’ll always remember that. There’s Audre Lorde’s Litany for Survival. And one line I always remember is from Toni Morrison’s Sula, that last line: girl..girl..girl..girl…
Can you speak a little about repetition?
It’s part of the musicality of poetry. Repetition is an essential tool for aural presence and poetentcy. Funny, I just misspelled “potency”, but poetency also works.
What guidance would you offer young poets?
Well, to even be compelled to write poetry, it takes a certain kind of shape of person – not that we’re all shaped the same. It’s almost like we’re all philosopher-singers, even if we’re not singing, we’re singing on paper. You need to learn to listen. To make your own path while also acknowledging you have poetry ancestors. We all have poetry ancestors. It’s important to feed your gift. The role of the poet has always been of the griots, the truth tellers, the healers. Sometimes the healers must break open the wound. To get there, you need to be yourself, and to feed the spirit of poetry. You must learn to trust, to trust your path, to trust language, to trust feeling uneasy at times. If you think you know where you’re going, then you’re already in trouble as a poet.
Ricardo Jaramillois a poet and writer from Philadelphia. His work has been published in the New York Times, The Believer, and The Rumpus, among other places. He was an inaugural 2021 PERIPLUS fellow, and a 2019-2020 Fulbright teaching fellow at La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. Currently, he works as a case manager at a school for immigrant youth in the Oakland Unified School District.
For a Girl Becoming
Joy Harjo, illus. by Adriana M. Garcia.
Norton, $18.99 (40p)
ISBN 978-1-32405-224-1
*| That day your spirit came to us rains came in from the Pacific to bless/ Clouds peered over the mountains in response to the singing of medicine plants." In urgent, lyrical lines, U.S. poet laureate Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, follows an Indigenous family in gathering to welcome an infant. Thickly stroked, muralistic paintings by Garcia (Remembering) open with a figure in the sky smudging a desert house. Within it, a woman labors, while outside, horses--"hundreds of them"--run the land "to accompany you here, to bless." A rainbow soon appears over the home, and family gathers bearing myriad gifts ("tobacco and cedar, new clothes, and joy for you"). As fluid, saturated images dotted with horses and rainbows follow the infant's maturation, refrain-like lines urge the child to remember the source of life's gifts (breathing, walking, running, laughing, crying, dreaming), then offer suggestions for how to move through the world Visualizing Indigenous traditions and underlining values of family and interdependence, it's a profoundly loving blessing of a book for anyone in a place of becoming. Ages 4-8. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"For a Girl Becoming." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 7, 17 Feb. 2025, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829933421/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6a15cb45. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.
Garcia, Adriana M. FOR A GIRL BECOMING Norton Young Readers (Children's None) $18.99 4, 29 ISBN: 9781324052241
In this tale from a powerhouse creative team, a family welcomes a child with an empowering and fiercely affectionate blessing to guide her growth.
"The day your spirit came to us rains came in from the Pacific // and all of us who loved you gathered, where / Pollen blew throughout that desert house to bless, / And horses were running the land, hundreds of them, / To accompany you here, to bless." And so a newborn baby girl with "black hair, / Brown eyes," and "skin the color of earth" joins a protective community that spans the heavens and earth. Page turns skillfully capture the passage of time, and as the child grows, she's enjoined to move through the world with compassion and meet both joys and hardships with determination. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Harjo's (Mvskoke Nation) fluid and impassioned second-person text circles back effectively to reiterate its enveloping missive, then appears in full at the book's end. Pura Belpré Award winner Garcia's dynamic and richly layered portraits deftly echo the poem's movement. A palette of vibrant turquoise and leafy green depicts the child maturing and thriving, while immersive double-page spreads in tawny hues seamlessly incorporate Native elements throughout. A standout among affirming picture books, this beatitude-inducing work will quickly become the new go-to baby present.
A stunningly illustrated, tender, and tenacious message--a boon to any bookshelf.(Picture book. 4-8)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Garcia, Adriana M.: FOR A GIRL BECOMING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835106655/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ab1cd321. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.
Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age. By Joy Harjo. Oct. 2025. 144P. Norton, $21.99 (9781324094173); e-book (9781324094180). 811.6.
Acclaimed writer, editor, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Harjo follows up her lyrical memoir, Poet Warrior (2021), with another genre-blending, autobiographical reflection. This time, Harjo tells stories of the coming-ofage challenges she faced in her youth and offers counsel to other Native women and girls who may face similar obstacles. In tightly composed prose and concise chapters interspersed with original poetry, Harjo harnesses a powerful second person voice to speak directly to readers as she addresses such sensitive topics as "Intimate Violence" ("You are thrown to the floor by a drunken father") and "Addiction" ("You are drinking, overdoing it on the smoke, can't let go of the emotional pain"). Harjo's compelling and affirming firsthand accounts describe navigating tricky family dynamics, turning toward compassion, and dealing with unimaginable loss. When she steps back to consider the enduring impact of "Historical Trauma," such as the devastating legacies of Indian schools, forced relocation, and continued discrimination, it's clear that Harjo's admissions, advice, and admonitions are not only necessary reading for Native girls and women but for every American.--Diego Baez
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Harjo's readership grows with each book and this mix of autobiography and counsel has enormous appeal.
YA Harjo's personal stories and advice will resonate with YAs contending with their own coming-of-age challenges. DB.
YA Recommendations
Adult titles recommended for teens are marked with the following symbols: YA, for books of general YA interest; YA/C, for books with particular curricular value; and YA/S, for books that will appeal most to teens with a special interest in a specific subject.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Baez, Diego. "Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 22, Aug. 2025, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A857641511/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fac3665e. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.
Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age
Joy Harjo. Norton, $21.99 (176p)
ISBN 978-1-324-09417-3
In this lyrical memoir, former U.S. poet laureate Harjo (Washing My Mother's Body) offers candid reflections on her artistic development and stirring inspiration for young Native women. In short chapters that address the reader directly, Harjo weaves profound personal experiences-including her grief over the death of her daughter, her struggles with crippling stage fright, and her memories of transformative musical experiences-with concise wisdom ("Your spirit doesn't tell you what to do. It shows you the story. What you choose to do is up to you"). Throughout, she remains consistently focused on the importance of creative expression, noting that writing is "part of carrying on voice, a voice that is full of stories that [give] us strength to survive, create, and keep going." She also soberly considers the challenges facing her fellow members of the Muscogee Nation, conceding that she "doesn't have the words to help" the community's problems with addiction or poverty, only "questions, tears, and anger," though "some questions can pry open a corner where light can shoot through." Elegant and worldly-wise, Harjo's ruminations linger long after the final page is turned. Readers of all stripes will find valuable guidance here. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 33, 25 Aug. 2025, p. 105. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A853655294/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13c0ef03. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.
Harjo, Joy GIRL WARRIOR Norton (NonFiction None) $21.99 10, 7 ISBN: 9781324094173
Words to the wise.
Poet Laureate Harjo addresses young Native girls in her latest melding of memoir and guidance, prose and poetry. Drawing on the challenges of her own life, she counsels readers who may be facing sadness, anger, grief, or despair. Growing up, she witnessed her father's betrayal of her mother, leading her to advise wariness about "placing your romantic dream on the back of someone who has no idea of your intention and no interest in your dream or you." Becoming pregnant as a teenager, Harjo struggled with the challenges of motherhood, dealing with a volatile partner, and trying to find her own way in the world. When she felt overwhelmed and suicidal, she discovered that there was "tremendous power in asking for help." Also powerful was listening to her own inner spirit. Harjo's world is spiritually resonant, swirling with ancestral memories and thoughts emanating from plants, animals, other humans, and even rainbows. "Every place has a signature energy," she writes, "as does every object, every being." She urges readers to be open to the "infinite possible versions" of their own stories. Believing that when the mind is hungry, "it searches for art, literature, performance, and knowledge," Harjo decided "to fall in love with creativity." She took up the saxophone at the age of 40, after having been discouraged to play the instrument when she was a child. The joy of making music helped her to transcend self-consciousness about playing: "There would be no story without mistakes," she writes. Harjo pays homage to her ancestors and tribal traditions, pointing to the cultural lessons that can be learned around the kitchen table and the richness of ancestors' wisdom. Listen to ancestors, she says, but be aware, she slyly adds: "Some ancestors are troublemakers."
Warmhearted advice.
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"Harjo, Joy: GIRL WARRIOR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A853631436/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=975cf2b2. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.