Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo’s eight books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry; a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. Her one-woman show is now released in book form from Wesleyan University Press: Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, a play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses. Forthcoming is An American Sunrise, a book of poetry from Norton, An American Sunrise. She is working on a musical that will revise the origin story of blues and jazz to include southeastern Native music, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented. Harjo is the recipient of a Tulsa Artist Fellowship and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation.