Joy Harjo

In addition to writing books and other publications, Harjo has taught in numerous United States universities, performed at poetry readings and music events, and released five albums of her original music. Harjo is the author of nine books of poetry, and two award-winning children's books, The Good Luck Cat and For a Girl Becoming. Her books include 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). She was a recipient of the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2019, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Harjo is the Director of For Girls Becoming, an art mentorship program for young Mvskoke women.

In 2019, Harjo was named the United States Poet Laureate. She is the first Native American to be so appointed.

In her poems, Harjo often explores her Muskogee/Creek background and spirituality in opposition to popular mainstream culture. In the United States, residents are influenced by the proliferation of images from television, film, and other media. 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." 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.

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."

In 2016, Harjo was appointed to the Chair of Excellence in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Harjo joined the faculty of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January 2013.

In 2009 Harjo won the Native American Music Award for best female artist. She has received several other awards (see below) for her music.

In 2002, Harjo received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales. In 2008, she served as a founding member of the Board of Directors for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, for which she serves as a member of its National Advisory Council.

In 1995, Harjo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.

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, and the University of New Mexico from 1991 to 1995.

Harjo enrolled at the University of New Mexico and started in pre-med. She changed her major to art after her first year. During her last year, she switched to creative writing to write poetry, as she was inspired by different Native American writers. She graduated in 1976. Harjo earned her master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1978. The poet also attended the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to take classes on filmmaking.

Harjo published her first volume in 1975, titled The Last Song, which consisted of nine of her poems. Harjo, through many readings and performances, shows great passion and emotion for the subjects she writes about. She often mixes both reading and singing her poems during performances, displaying two elements of her works.

Joy Harjo (born May 9, 1951) is a poet, musician, playwright, and author. Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground.) She is also the first Native American United States Poet Laureate. 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 at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.

Harjo was born on May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The first of four children, Harjo’s birth name was Joy Foster. Her father, Allen W. Foster, was Muscogee Creek, and her mother, Wynema Baker Foster, has mixed-race ancestry of Cherokee, French, and Irish. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

She began to play the saxophone at the age of 40. For her it fills the void she felt left by her singing voice. She had also learned that her paternal grandmother, whose surname she took when enrolling in the Creek nation, had loved the instrument from her years in Indian Territory before Oklahoma was admitted to the union in 1907. 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.