National Poet Laureate, author, and acclaimed musician, Joy Harjo, will read poetry then join in conversation with students from the First Nations Club at Peninsula College. Click here to register.
The visit was made possible through generous contributions to the Peninsula College Foundation and is being offered in partnership with ʔaʔk̓ʷustəƞáwt̓xʷ House of Learning, Peninsula College Longhouse and The First Nations Club.
Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, and is the first Native American to hold this position. She is an internationally known award-winning poet, writer, performer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation.
Harjo is the author of nine books of poetry and a memoir. Her poetry collections include An American Sunrise (W.W. Norton, 2019); Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses.
Her writing awards include the 2019 Jackson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
“Harjo’s work speaks not only to the world we live in, but to the unseen world that moves through us, the thread that has connected us all from the start,” according to The Judges Citation of the Jackson Prize. “Throughout her luminous and substantial body of work, there is a sense of timelessness, of ‘ongoingness’, of history repeating; these are poems that hold us up to the truth and insist we pay attention.”
Her memoir Crazy Brave (W.W. Norton, 2012) won several awards including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. It was called “The best kind of memoir, an unself-conscious mix of autobiography, spiritual rumination, cultural evaluation, history and political analysis told in simple but authoritative and deeply poetic prose” by Ms Magazine.
Harjo is currently working on her next memoir, and has a commission from the Public Theater of NY, to write We Were There When Jazz Was Invented—a musical play that will restore southeastern natives to the American story of blues and jazz.
Soul Talk, Song Language (2011, Wesleyan) is a collection of Harjo’s essays and interviews. She co-edited three anthologies of contemporary Native women’s writing: Living Nations, Living Words, When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through and Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Native Women’s Writing of North America, named one of the London Observer’s Best Books of 1997. She wrote the award-winning children’s book The Good Luck Cat (Harcourt), and in 2009 she published a young adult, coming-of-age-book, For A Girl Becoming, which won a Moonbeam Award and a Silver Medal from the Independent Publishers Awards.
A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. She has five CDs of music and poetry to her name, including her most recent award-winning album of traditional flute, Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. She also performs her one-woman show, “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light,” which premiered at the Wells Fargo Theater in Los Angeles in 2009 with other performances at the Public Theater in NYC and La Jolla Playhouse as part of the Native Voices at the Autry.
Harjo is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Rasmuson United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame.
Studium Generale is partnering with The First Nations Club at Peninsula College, and ʔaʔk̓ʷustəƞáwt̓xʷ House of Learning, PC Longhouse for the event, and recognizes that Peninsula College’s main campus sits on traditional nəxʷsƛ̕ay̕əm lands (in English Klallam/S'Klallam).
The First Nations Club and Studium are also partnering with Port Book and News to promote Joy Harjo's books.