Acclaimed Indigenous poet, memoirist, and musician, Joy Harjo, winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction, will read from her poetry at UConn’s main campus in Storrs on Wednesday, March 28th and at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts on Thursday, March 29th, 2018.
Harjo will appear at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, March 28th at the Konover Auditorium of the Dodd Center, 405 Babbidge Road on the UConn Storrs campus. She will offer a second reading at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 29 at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, 162-170 Huyshope Avenue, Hartford. Both readings are free and open to the public.
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 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 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. She is Professor of English and Chair of Excellence in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
The Wallace Stevens Poetry Program began in 1964 with funding from The Hartford to honor modernist master poet Wallace Stevens, a former vice president of The Hartford. In the last half century, the program has brought a roster of the most important national and international poets to Connecticut. This year’s program is sponsored by The Hartford, with additional support from American Studies, Humanities Institute, Creative Writing Program, The English Speaker’s Fund, and The Rightors Fund for Children’s Literature, all housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For more information, please visit http://wallacestevens.uconn.edu.