Joy Harjo, the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate and a member of the Muscogee Nation, is the author of 10 books of poetry, several plays, children’s books and two memoirs. She is a recipient of Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lily Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation and the inaugural artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center that opened in 2022 in Harjo’s hometown of Tulsa, OK. Harjo’s poems are described as musical, intimate, political and wise, intertwining ancestral memory and tribal histories with resilience and love. “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years” was published in 2022.
As a musician and performer, she has produced several award-winning albums, including her latest, “I Pray for My Enemies” (2021).
This event is co-sponsored by the Cultural Affairs Program and the English, Foreign Languages and English as a Second Language Department to celebrate National Native American Heritage Month.
