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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.

Key Information

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

[edit]
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 Bureau of Indian Affairs 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

[edit]

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

[edit]

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

[edit]

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

[edit]
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

[edit]

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

[edit]

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]

Harjo's poetry is included on plaque of LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans.[66]

She received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.[67] In 2024, Harjo was given the Lumine Lifetime Achievement Award by the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma[68]

She received an honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from the University of St Andrews in 2024.[69] Harju was named the Hemingway Distinguished Lecturer at The Community Library in 2024.[70] She received a Kettering Foundation Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship in 2025.[citation needed]

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]

On November 15, 2025, Harjo was honored with the National Portrait Gallery's Portrait of a Nation Award. The Award recognizes the honoree "for their transformative contributions to American history and culture"[75] and was presented to her by Sandra Cisneros. Harjo’s portrait was created by artist Joel Daniel Phillips.

Personal life

[edit]

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

[edit]

Bibliography

[edit]

Poetic works

[edit]
  • 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, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2023. ISBN 978-1-324-03648-7. OCLC 1294289380.

As editor

[edit]
  • 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

[edit]

Children's literature

[edit]

Discography

[edit]

Solo albums

[edit]
  • 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

[edit]
  • This America (2011)[87]

Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice

[edit]
  • Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century (1997)

See also

[edit]

Notes

[edit]

References

[edit]
[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Joy Harjo

View on Grokipedia
from Grokipedia

Joy Harjo (born Joy Foster; May 9, 1951) is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author enrolled in the (Creek) Nation.
Born in , Harjo earned a BA from the and an MFA from the .
She served three terms as the 23rd Consultant in Poetry from 2019 to 2022, marking the first time a Native American held the position.
Harjo has authored ten books of poetry, several plays, memoirs, and works of prose, with her writing frequently incorporating oral traditions, themes of survival, and critiques of .
As a performer, she plays the and integrates music into her poetry readings, contributing to her recognition as a multidisciplinary artist.
Her tenure as included the "Living Nations, Living Words" project, which gathered contemporary Native American poetry to highlight indigenous voices.

Early Life and Heritage

Family Background and Childhood

Joy Harjo was born Joy Foster on May 9, 1951, in , the eldest of four children born to Allen W. Foster, an enrolled (Creek) Nation citizen and sheet-metal worker, and Wynema Foster (née Banks), who had , French, and Irish ancestry. Harjo, originally surnamed after her mother's family, later adopted Harjo, a name linked to her paternal lineage, and is herself an enrolled member of the . Her family's life in Tulsa reflected the urban Native American communities that formed after historical forced relocations, including the 19th-century and later mid-20th-century migrations amid federal policies like the , which encouraged movement from reservations to cities but often exacerbated economic and cultural disconnection. Harjo's early years were marked by family instability, including her parents' when she was eight years old, driven by her father's and associated volatility. Her mother remarried, but Harjo has recounted in her memoir Crazy Brave experiences of verbal and from her , alongside broader household tensions tied to alcohol use, which contributed to a disrupted home environment common in some Native families navigating intergenerational trauma from displacement and . These self-reported accounts, drawn from Harjo's personal reflections rather than external corroboration, highlight survival amid relational strife without external verification of all details. Amid these challenges, Harjo encountered early influences from oral traditions and storytelling, integral to her heritage, as well as music through home gatherings featuring country swing performers in Tulsa's vibrant scene. While her direct engagement with playing began later, around age 40, childhood exposure to instruments via relatives like her grandmother, who played in the early 1900s, and local elements fostered an auditory foundation. emerged as a personal outlet during , helping her process hardships like fragmentation and teen motherhood, though her first documented poem dates to age 22 following her second child's birth. These elements, tied to rather than formal training, underscored her initial creative resilience in an unstable setting.

Education and Formative Influences

Harjo attended high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in , beginning in 1967, after leaving home at age sixteen. The institution, then operated as a boarding school, emphasized Native American and provided Harjo with an environment for creative development, including her initial serious engagement with amid personal challenges. She graduated from IAIA in 1968. Following high school, Harjo enrolled at the , initially pursuing pre-med studies before shifting to . She earned a in English with a focus on from the university in 1976. Harjo then pursued graduate studies at the University of Iowa's , completing a in in 1978. Her time there exposed her to rigorous literary training, though she later reflected on tensions in adapting Native perspectives to predominantly non-Native academic frameworks, contributing to her emphasis on self-directed cultural reclamation over institutional conformity. These experiences, combined with early post-graduation teaching roles, such as at IAIA in 1978–79, reinforced her independent approach to intellectual growth outside elite circles.

Professional Development

Academic and Teaching Career

Harjo began her teaching career as an instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts in , shortly after completing her MFA at the in 1978. She returned to the institution for additional periods of instruction in the early 1980s, delivering courses in and related disciplines. Throughout her career, Harjo held faculty positions at multiple universities, where she emphasized and American Indian studies. These included roles at , the , the , the , the University of Hawai'i, the University of California-Los Angeles, and the , Knoxville. Her centered on practical development of literary skills, drawing from Native traditions to foster student proficiency in and craft rather than abstract ideological frameworks. In 2013, Harjo joined the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a professor, teaching creative writing until 2016. She later served on the faculty at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as Professor and Chair of Excellence in Creative Writing. Harjo's involvement with the Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers supported skill-building workshops and mentorship for emerging Native authors, prioritizing tangible outcomes like publication readiness over grievance-oriented narratives. The empirical measure of her influence appears in the body of work produced by alumni from her programs, including published collections by former students in Native literature.

Literary Beginnings

Harjo's initial foray into publishing occurred with The Last Song in 1975, a slim volume comprising nine poems that introduced her observations on the experiences of , drawing from settings in and . This debut, self-published or through a , reflected nascent explorations of personal and cultural fragmentation without the broader thematic maturity of her later work. Her second collection, What Moon Drove Me to This?, appeared in from I. Reed Books, incorporating the poems from The Last Song alongside new material organized into seasonal sections that evoked cyclical Native motifs of winter and summer renewal. These works demonstrated an early stylistic reliance on concise, image-driven verse rooted in oral traditions, prioritizing direct emotional resonance over elaborate narrative structures. The 1983 publication of She Had Some Horses by Thunder's Mouth Press signaled a pivotal evolution, as Harjo delved into extended, metaphorical explorations of inner multiplicity—using as symbols for conflicting human impulses, cultural resilience, and the reclamation of Native individuality amid . This collection marked her transition toward more layered, performative language that intertwined personal agency with communal memory, gaining early notice through inclusions in anthologies like : Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women (1984), which highlighted emerging voices in Native .

Musical and Performance Career

Joy Harjo began integrating music into her performances in the early 1990s, founding the band , which combined , tribal, , and rock elements with her recitation and playing. The band's debut , Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century, released in 1997 by Silver Wave Records, featured Harjo on alongside drums and bass, blending improvisational rhythms with Native American influences and her spoken-word . Harjo's solo musical output includes the 2008 album Winding Through the , a collection of 12 tracks showcasing her work fused with poetic elements and diverse rhythms drawn from and Native traditions. This release earned her the Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009, recognizing her contributions within Native music circuits. Her performances often emphasize live improvisation, collaborating with Native musicians to merge and in unscripted fusions rather than rigidly structured sets. Harjo has toured extensively, performing at major venues such as Music Festival's Spotlight Series on July 30, 2022, where she presented her work combining music and . These live shows highlight her proficiency and the band's dynamic interplay, contributing to her reputation for commercially viable recordings in specialized Native and audiences.

Activism and Public Roles

Advocacy for Native American Issues

Harjo worked as a consultant for the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) from 1980 to 1983, an organization founded in 1961 to empower Native youth through leadership training and advocacy against federal assimilation policies. Her involvement in the and early included promoting indigenous , though empirical assessments of NIYC's long-term policy impacts remain limited, with critics noting that such youth-focused efforts often prioritize symbolic resistance over measurable economic gains for tribal communities. In 2007, Harjo became a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF), a nonprofit incorporated on of that year to award grants supporting indigenous artists and cultural projects across . The NACF has distributed millions in funding since inception, aiming to bolster artistic expression as a form of cultural , yet some economists argue that heavy reliance on arts grants diverts resources from and enterprise development critical for reducing persistent rates on reservations, which exceed 25% nationally per U.S. data. Harjo later chaired the board, emphasizing grants that preserve traditional practices amid debates over whether such preservation efforts inadvertently sustain dependency on federal frameworks rather than fostering individual economic agency. Harjo publicly opposed the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, describing it as a "crucial junction of destruction" threatening water sources and tribal lands during the Standing Rock protests. Her critiques drew from Mvskoke history of federal land dispossession, framing pipelines as extensions of historical assimilation tactics that undermine . Despite widespread activism, the pipeline became operational in 2017, highlighting tensions between environmental-cultural advocacy and energy infrastructure needs, with alternative viewpoints stressing that blocking such projects could limit revenue opportunities for tribes seeking self-reliance through resource extraction. Through projects like the 2020 "Living Nations, Living Words" initiative—conceived during her 2019 tenure—Harjo curated digital mappings and recordings of 47 contemporary Native poets to affirm living indigenous voices against erasure by federal policies. This work critiques ongoing assimilation legacies, rooted in her personal narratives of displacement, but faces scrutiny for prioritizing poetic symbolism over quantifiable policy reforms, as tribal economic data shows cultural initiatives alone have not reversed high rates averaging 50% on many reservations. Analysts debate whether such emphasis on heritage preservation hinders adaptation to market-driven , potentially perpetuating reliance on aid structures established post-Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

Poet Laureate Tenure and Government Positions

Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd Consultant in Poetry to the on June 19, 2019, becoming the first Native American to hold the position. The role, which carries a one-year term of $35,000, was extended for Harjo in a rare exception, allowing her to serve three consecutive terms through 2022. During her tenure, Harjo's signature initiative, "Living Nations, Living Words," gathered poems, stories, and recordings from more than 50 contemporary Native American poets, culminating in an online anthology and interactive map of Native nations hosted by the to promote awareness of Indigenous literary traditions and ongoing cultural vitality. This project, launched amid the , shifted to virtual formats, enabling broader digital engagement with Native voices through Library events and resources. The effort received recognition from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums in 2022 for its contributions to preserving and disseminating Native narratives. Post-tenure, Harjo extended her institutional influence as the inaugural at the Center in , beginning after the center's 2022 opening, where she develops educational programs and live performances drawing on her poetic and musical expertise. This residency builds on her Laureate-era focus by integrating Native perspectives into broader American cultural archives.

International Engagements and Controversies

Harjo has conducted performances across multiple continents, including , , , and , as well as at international events such as the Summer and Winter Olympics and various music festivals. These engagements often featured her , , and vocal performances, either solo or with her band, emphasizing themes of indigenous resilience and cross-cultural storytelling. Her first international appearance occurred in Amsterdam at the One World Poetry Festival, marking the start of a sustained global presence that extended to forums like the International Literature Festival Berlin. A notable controversy arose during her December 2012 tour in , where she performed at amid calls from pro-Palestinian activists and the (BDS) movement to cancel in solidarity with Palestinian civil society. Groups including the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) urged adherence to the boycott, arguing that cultural events in normalize occupation and apartheid-like policies, drawing parallels to Native American experiences of dispossession. Harjo initially rejected the demands, proceeding with the Tel Aviv show, but later added an unscheduled visit to the in response to the pressure, stating she had spoken too hastily against the boycott and sought to engage both sides. Critics from BDS-aligned outlets, such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss—which advocate strongly for Palestinian causes and have been accused of selective framing that overlooks Israeli security contexts—condemned the West Bank addition as insufficient, equating it to crossing a picket line and undermining indigenous solidarity by prioritizing performance over principled non-engagement. Harjo reported receiving hate mail and feeling harassed, viewing the demands as coercive rather than dialogic, while supporters argued the tour fostered cross-cultural exchange amid entrenched conflict. The episode highlighted tensions between universalist artistic outreach and targeted boycotts, with backlash concentrated among activist networks but no evident disruption to her broader audience reach or subsequent invitations. Later reflections, including from Native groups like The Red Nation, reiterated criticism of the decision as a missed opportunity for aligned resistance, though Harjo maintained her approach emphasized personal conscience over external mandates.

Works and Creative Output

Poetry and Literary Works


Joy Harjo's poetic oeuvre includes ten books of poetry, with her debut chapbook The Last Song published in 1975. Her 1983 collection She Had Some Horses examines intimate aspects of womanhood through a Native lens. Subsequent volumes such as Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015) and An American Sunrise (2019) address themes of reconciliation, history, and land connection informed by Muscogee heritage. In non-fiction, Harjo published the memoir Crazy Brave in 2012, recounting her early life and artistic awakening. The essay collection Catching the Light, released in 2022, reflects on her motivations for writing as part of Press's "Why I Write" series. Harjo has also authored children's books, including For A Becoming in 2025, illustrated by Adriana Garcia, aimed at young Native readers navigating identity. As an editor, Harjo co-edited the 1997 anthology Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of with Gloria Bird, compiling works by Indigenous women writers. Harjo's poetry draws on Muscogee mythology and storytelling traditions, blending them with jazz-inspired elements like syncopated rhythms, , and call-and-response patterns. Her stylistic approach spans personal narratives to expansive explorations of cultural survival and cosmic interconnectedness.

Music and Collaborative Projects


Joy Harjo's musical output centers on albums that integrate her playing, vocals, and spoken-word with , rock, folk, and indigenous influences, often produced in collaboration with her band Poetic Justice. Her debut album, Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century (2003), recorded with Poetic Justice, features original tracks emphasizing themes of grace and resilience, as noted in the describing "poetic justice" as a redemptive force. This work marked her entry into recorded music, blending improvisational elements with rhythmic ensembles to create a hybrid form distinct from traditional or standalone recitation. Subsequent solo albums expanded this fusion, such as Native Joy for Real (2004), which incorporates hip-hop soul accents alongside native sonic traditions for a versatile sound suitable for singing, dancing, or reflection. Winding Through the (2008) earned her a Native American Music (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009, recognizing its emotionally resonant compositions drawing from earthly and cosmic motifs. These projects highlight Harjo's intent to evoke healing through interdisciplinary performance, prioritizing narrative depth over conventional genre purity. Harjo's collaborative efforts extend to live integrations of and , as seen in her 2025 Bioneers Conference keynote, where she wove musical references into discussions of artistic journeys in the "story field," underscoring and sound as interconnected tools for cultural preservation and provocation. Her more recent album, I Pray for My Enemies (2024), continues this trajectory with ensemble contributions focused on themes of reconciliation amid global strife. Overall, Harjo's , comprising five original albums, demonstrates a consistent emphasis on saxophone-led and cross-genre experimentation to amplify indigenous voices.

Recent Publications and Projects

In 2025, Harjo released Girl Warrior: On , an collection drawing on her personal experiences to guide Native girls and women through transitional challenges, highlighting moments of , resilience, and cultural continuity. The , published on October 7, emphasizes survival strategies rooted in Indigenous narratives and personal reflection. Harjo also published For a Girl Becoming in 2025, a children's co-illustrated by M. Garcia, which traces a girl's lifecycle from birth to adulthood while underscoring familial and environmental interconnections. This poetic narrative serves as a for young readers, celebrating growth amid broader ecological and cultural ties. In July 2024, Brown University's John Hay Library acquired Harjo's recent papers, comprising materials from 2021 to 2024 including drafts, correspondence, scripts, and performance notes, to bolster archival resources for Indigenous literary studies. This collection advances preservation efforts for her evolving creative output. Harjo served as the inaugural André Harvey Creative Fellow at Longwood Gardens, undertaking a two-week residency from October 12 to 25, 2025, to engage with the site's landscapes for interdisciplinary inspiration in poetry and storytelling. During the residency, she hosted public storytelling sessions integrating themes of nature, memory, and artistic process. At the 2025 Bioneers Conference, Harjo delivered a exploring her trajectory through the "story field," a for weaving , music, and Indigenous knowledge into cultural healing narratives. The address, given in May, extended discussions on creativity's role in addressing environmental and social disruptions.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Achievements and Awards

Joy Harjo received the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award in 1990, recognizing her contributions to Native American arts. In 2001, she was awarded the Open Book Award for her collection A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales, honoring works that expand cultural understanding. For her musical work, Harjo won the Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009, tied to her album Winding Through the Milky Way. In 2017, Harjo received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a $100,000 award for lifetime achievement in American poetry. She was appointed the 23rd of the in 2019 by the , becoming the first Native American in the role, and served three consecutive terms through 2022. That same year, she won the Jackson from Poets & Writers, which included $65,000 to support her writing. Post-laureateship honors include the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, acknowledging her enduring impact on and . In 2023, awarded her the Bollingen Prize for for her collection Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years and lifetime contributions. Harjo received the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal in 2024 for distinguished lifetime achievement in , one of the field's highest honors.
YearAwardGranting InstitutionNotes
1990American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts AwardNational organization for Native artsEarly recognition of artistic impact.
2001PEN Open Book AwardFor A Map to the Next World.
2009NAMMY Best Female ArtistFor musical performance.
2017Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize$100,000 lifetime achievement.
2019Jackson Poetry PrizePoets & Writers$65,000 for emerging recognition.
2019–2022U.S. (three terms)First Native American appointee.
2022Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement AwardNational Book Critics CircleFor career influence.
2023Bollingen PrizeFor poetry collection and body of work.
2024Frost MedalPoetry Society of AmericaLifetime poetry distinction.

Thematic Analysis and Influences

Harjo's poetry recurrently explores themes of memory and interconnection between human experience and the natural world, positing that individual agency arises from acknowledging shared origins and responsibilities. In the poem "Remember," published in She Had Some Horses (1983), she urges readers to recall their ties to , family, and , framing elements like the sun, wind, and animals as kin that demand ethical reciprocity rather than passive reverence. This motif underscores a causal chain: historical leads to disconnection, while deliberate remembrance fosters resilience amid disruption. Such themes derive from observable ecological interdependencies—predator-prey dynamics, seasonal cycles—yet Harjo elevates them through narrative urgency, avoiding abstraction by rooting imperatives in lived continuity. Central to her work is trauma recovery, depicted not as interminable victimhood but as active reclamation amid historical ruptures like the Muscogee Nation's forced relocation during the in the , which scattered communities and eroded traditional land-based knowledge. Poems in collections such as What Moon Drove Me to This? (1979) and The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994) portray war, death, and loss as dual forces yielding discovery and , where characters navigate violence through and adaptation rather than stasis. This approach aligns with causal realism: disruptions from colonial policies impose tangible costs—demographic collapse, cultural fragmentation—but recovery hinges on individual and communal actions like preserving oral histories, not essentialized spiritual superiority. Harjo's emphasis on agency critiques perpetual grievance narratives, favoring empirical strategies for continuity, such as linguistic revitalization amid . Influences from (Creek) lore infuse her verse with motifs of cyclical time and communal memory, drawn from ancestral narratives of emergence and endurance, while structures—improvisational rhythms and —shape its oral performativity. Her saxophone performances and collaborations, as in Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century (1996) with Poetic Wave, mirror 's call-and-response, echoing Muscogee storytelling traditions without romanticizing them as innately transcendent; instead, they function as adaptive tools against erasure, grounded in historical contingencies like reservation-era adaptations. This synthesis critiques potential in indigenous representations: while lore provides metaphors for interconnection, Harjo's integration with —a form born of African American innovation under oppression—highlights hybrid causality over purity, rejecting notions of indigenous wisdom as inherently superior to mechanistic or scientific understandings of reality. Harjo's thematic framework has permeated broader American poetry, evidenced by citations in non-Native anthologies and scholarship that adapt her memory motifs for multicultural resilience narratives, influencing writers beyond indigenous contexts to interrogate displacement's long-term effects. Her work's impact lies in modeling storytelling as a counter to historical amnesia, measurable in its integration into curricula examining eco-cultural identity, though academic analyses often risk over-spiritualizing her realism, per critiques of institutional tendencies to favor romantic indigeneity. This legacy prioritizes verifiable continuity—language transmission, artistic hybridity—over idealized origins, contributing to a poetry that bridges tribal specifics with universal causal patterns of survival.

Criticisms and Debates

Critics have argued that Harjo's poetry often relies on narratives of personal trauma and collective Indigenous suffering, leveraging her ethnic identity in a manner that prioritizes therapeutic over rigorous literary depth or epiphany. This approach, according to poet and critic David Solway, aligns with broader trends in contemporary verse toward simplistic self-disclosure, diminishing poetry's traditional layers of meaning. Her live performances have also drawn mixed assessments; a 2022 Tanglewood appearance, blending poetry and music, was deemed a disappointment by reviewer Robert Israel, who noted that while Harjo's shamanistic charisma captivates audiences, it failed to deliver substantive poetic engagement. In ideological spheres, Harjo encountered backlash in December 2012 for proceeding with a performance at Tel Aviv University despite Palestinian-led boycott calls under the BDS movement, which framed Israel's policies as parallel to colonial dispossession of Native lands. Harjo defended her decision by citing undisclosed Palestinian support and scheduling a West Bank visit, but critics, including Native scholars, accused her of inconsistent solidarity, prioritizing selective engagements over unified anti-colonial stances. This episode underscored debates over the coherence of Harjo's activism, with detractors questioning whether her emphasis on tribal collective identity overlooks broader geopolitical complexities or personal ethical agency. Harjo's tenure as U.S. , the first for a Native American, has prompted in some quarters about whether institutional emphasis on diversity influenced selections beyond pure merit, though her prior fellowships, sales of works like An American Sunrise (over 10,000 copies by 2020), and awards such as the Ruth Lilly Prize substantiate her literary standing. Assessments of her highlight a gap between cultural symbolism and empirical outcomes; while Harjo has amplified Native voices through and public roles, no direct attributions link her efforts to specific policy reforms, such as legislative changes in tribal or land rights, contrasting with her focus on narrative reclamation and awareness.

Personal Life

Relationships and Family

Harjo's first marriage was to Phil Wilmon, a fellow student at the Institute of American Indian Arts, whom she met in 1967; the couple had a son, Phil Dayn, born in 1969, before divorcing around 1971. In 1971, Harjo married the poet ; they had a daughter, Rainy Dawn Ortiz, before the marriage ended in divorce in 1974. Harjo raised her two children primarily as a single mother following these unions. Harjo subsequently married Owen Chopoksa Sapulpa, with whom she formed a blended family; she is stepmother to his children. Her daughter Rainy Dawn has pursued music and , reflecting a familial continuity in creative expression.

Health, Residence, and Later Years

Harjo resides in , on the Reservation, maintaining close ties to her Muscogee Creek heritage and birthplace. This location facilitates her involvement in local cultural institutions, including her role as the inaugural at the Center, appointed in 2022 to present educational programs and performances over a multi-year period. Her ongoing fellowship, such as the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship from the Kettering Foundation, underscores continued engagement in creative and intellectual pursuits. In her later works, Harjo reflects on aging through poems like "Becoming Seventy," published in the 2019 collection An American Sunrise, which contemplates , time's malleability, and personal evolution amid life's transitions. She has addressed challenges, including depression, noting that writing serves as a mechanism without requiring such struggles for . As of 2025, Harjo demonstrates sustained productivity, with recent residencies such as the two-week André Harvey Creative Fellowship at in October 2025, focused on storytelling and performance, and scheduled appearances including a at Bioneers in May 2025. These activities highlight her adaptability and commitment to weaving poetry, music, and advocacy into public discourse, countering any narrative of decline at age 74.

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