Joy Harjo

• Born: May 9, 1951
• Birthplace: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Author Profile

Joy Harjo is the twenty-third Poet Laureate of the United States. As poet laureate, she served three consecutive terms from 2019 to 2022. Her poetry collections express a close relationship to the environment and the particularities of the Indigenous American and White cultures from which she is descended. She is an enrolled member of the Mvskoke Nation, the mother of two children (a son, Phil, and a daughter, Rainy Dawn), and a grandmother. Various art forms were always a part of her life, even in childhood. Her grandmother and aunt were painters. In high school, she trained as a dancer and toured as a dancer and actor with one of the country's first Indigenous American dance troupes. When her tour ended, she returned to Oklahoma, where her son was born when she was seventeen. She left her son’s father to move to New Mexico, enrolling as a pre-med student in college. After one semester, she decided that her interest in art was compelling enough to engage in its formal study.

Educated at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she later worked as an instructor, she received a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico and a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Iowa. She was a professor of English at both the University of Arizona and the University of New Mexico. She also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Montana and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. In the mid-2020s, Harjo was the first artist-in-residence at Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Bob Dylan Center, and she continued to make public appearances through speaking engagements and performances. Harjo was also the Professor and Chair of Excellence in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Among Harjo's most highly recognized works are the poetry collections She Had Some Horses (1983) and In Mad Love and War (1991), the midlife retrospective How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2001 (2002), and a memoir, Crazy Brave (2012). In 2016, she published Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems, and in 2019, she published An American Sunrise: Poems, which went on to win the 2020 Oklahoma Book Award. Her second memoir, Poet Warrior: A Memoir, was published in 2021, and in 2022, Catching the Light, her 2021 Windham-Campbell Lecture at Yale University was published by Yale University Press. In celebration of her fifty years as a poet, Harjo released Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years in 2022.

Harjo became the first Indigenous American to be named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019. She is also the second US poet laureate to be appointed to a third consecutive term. Her signature project as poet laureate was titled Living Nations, Living Words, and it celebrated Indigenous American writers and artists. In addition to serving as Poet Laureate, Harjo has received numerous awards for her writing, including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Delmore Schwartz Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation, the PEN Open Book Award, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry. In 2024, she was awarded the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

In addition to poetry, Harjo has written short stories and children's books, scripted several teleplays and films, and, along with Gloria Bird, coedited an anthology of writings by other American Indian women. In collaboration with illustrator Michaela Goade, Harjo released her third children’s book, Remember, in April 2023.

Harjo’s poetry has been influenced by her interest in music, especially jazz. She plays the saxophone in a band, Poetic Justice, combining jazz and reggae's musical influences with her poetry. Many of her poems are tributes to the various musicians who have influenced her work, including saxophonists John Coltrane and Jim Pepper. Some of her later musical offerings also incorporate hip-hop and blues elements.

The history and mythology of her people and the current state of their oppression remained prominent themes in Harjo's work. As she states in the explanation of her poem “Witness,” “The Indian wars never ended in this country . . . we were hated for our difference by our enemies.”

Bibliography

"About." Joy Harjo, www.joyharjo.com/about. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.

Alexander, Kerri Lee. "Joy Harjo." National Women's History Museum, 2019, www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/joy-harjo. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.

Andrews, Jennifer. "In the Belly of a Laughing God: Reading Humor and Irony in the Poetry of Joy Harjo." American Indian Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2, 2000, pp. 200–218.

Bolen, Anne. "Strong Words: Poet and Musician Joy Harjo Becomes the First Native U.S. Poet Laureate." American Indian Magazine, 2019, www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/strong-words. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.

Clark, C. B. "Joy Harjo (Creek)." The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter, et al., vol. 2, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Coltelli, Laura, editor. The Spiral of Memory: Interviews, Joy Harjo. University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Donovan, Kathleen. "Dark Continent/Dark Woman." Feminist Readings of Native American Literature. The University of Arizona Press, 1998.

"Joy Harjo." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/joy-harjo. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.

Lang, Nancy. "'Twin Gods Bending Over:' Joy Harjo and Poetic Memory." Melus, vol. 18, no. 3, Fall 1993, pp. 41–49.

Pettit, Rhonda. Joy Harjo. Boise State University Western Writer Series, 1998.

Wilson, Norma C. "The Ground Speaks: The Poetry of Joy Harjo." The Nature of Native American Poetry. University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

Womack, Craig S. "Joy Harjo: Creek Writer from the End of the Twentieth Century." Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.