About the Author

JOY HARJO became the first Native American to be named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019. She is associate professor of English at the University of Arizona, an editor, a screenwriter, and a player of tenor sax. A member of the Creek (Muscogee) tribe, he was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in that state and in New Mexico. She attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where she later was an instructor, and was graduated from the University of New Mexico (B.A. 1976) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A. 1978). She was assistant professor at the University of Colorado fro 985 to 1988. HARJO has published two other books of poetry, What Moo Drove Me To This? And She Had Some Horses, and a chapbook, The Last Song. Secrets from the Center of the World (with her text and photographs by Stephen Strom) was published in 1989, and a taped recording of her poetry, "Furious Light," was issued in 196 by the Watershed Foundation. She has received an Academy of American Poetry Award at the University of New Mexico, an NEA Creative Fellowship (1978), an EA summer stipend at the University of Arizona (1978), and an Arizona Commission on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1989). She won firs place in poetry at the Santa Fe Festival for the Arts (1980). Harjo also earned the Oklahoma Center for the Book's Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award. Her home is in Tucson.

Reviews

"Joy Harjo is now writing a visionary poetry that is among the very best we have."--Village Voice

"I first encountered Joy Harjo, member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, at the Gathering of Nations powwow in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the late 1990s. At an offsite event she read some poems, then sang and played her saxophone with her band, Poetic Justice. I was transfixed. I picked up a book of her poetry, "In Mad Love and War" (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), which she signed and inscribed, "For Chris, For Justice, For Love." I have carried that book with me through every move, every bookshelf culling, every physical and emotional transformation since. At a time when I was just beginning to appreciate poetry, Harjo's work became a touchstone against which pretty much everything else would be measured. The poetry of other writers has come and gone, but Harjo's work has remained lodged deep in my heart."--Christopher LaTray, The Missoulian

"Joy Harjo is one of the real poets of our mixed, fermenting, end-of-century North American imagination."--Adrienne Rich

"In Mad Love and War moved me and made me feel quite pried open and shot through with a very immanent sacred power and a sense also of the strength ad endurance of a woman who draws energy and insight and compassion from everything in her background"--Marge Piercy