Magic City Books is proud to welcome our friend, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo for a virtual event celebrating the release of the new anthology Living Nations, Living Words, the companion piece to her signature project as Poet Laureate.
Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.
This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project–including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others–to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, “that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.
This free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance for the event on Zoom visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Gecs2kHOSmukzj6wqPcUsw.
After registering you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to join the event on Monday April 26 at 7:00 pm CT.
Living Nations, Living Words will be published on May 4. To pre-order a copy visit: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/living-nations-living-words/470.
