1. Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author.
65 Facts About Joy Harjo
1. 2.
Joy Harjo served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor.
3.
Joy Harjo was only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms.
4.
Joy Harjo is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century.
5.
Joy Harjo studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
6.
Joy Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, and three children's books, The Good Luck Cat, For a Girl Becoming, and most recently, Remember.
7.
Joy Harjo has been designated as the 14th Oklahoma Cultural Treasure at the 44th Oklahoma Governor's Arts Awards.
8.
Joy Harjo's father, Allen W Foster, was an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Nation.
9.
Joy Harjo's mother was Wynema Baker Foster of Arkansas, who Harjo has identified as being of Irish, French, and Cherokee Nation descent, and possibly of Chickasaw descent.
10.
However, Joy Harjo has stated that her mother and her maternal grandmother were not enrolled, despite her mother's self-identification as a Cherokee descendant.
11.
Joy Harjo's work is heavily inspired by the creativity of her mother, aunts, and grandmother, as well as her culture.
12.
At the age of 16, Joy Harjo attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, which at the time was a BIA boarding school, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for high school.
13.
Joy Harjo loved painting and found that it gave her a way to express herself.
14.
Joy Harjo was inspired by her great-aunt, Lois Joy Harjo Ball, who was a painter.
15.
Joy Harjo enrolled as a pre-med student the University of New Mexico.
16.
Joy Harjo changed her major to art after her first year.
17.
Joy Harjo earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1978.
18.
Joy Harjo took filmmaking classes at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
19.
Joy Harjo taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts from 1978 to 1979 and 1983 to 1984.
20.
Joy Harjo 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, the University of New Mexico from 1991 to 1997 and later from 2005 to 2010, UCLA in 1998 and from 2001 to 2005, University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast Low Residency MFA Program from 2011 to 2012, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 2013 to 2016, and University of Tennessee, Knoxville from 2016 to 2018.
21.
Joy Harjo has played alto saxophone with her band Poetic Justice, edited literary journals and anthologies, and written screenplays, plays, and children's books.
22.
In 1995, Joy Harjo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.
23.
Joy Harjo joined the faculty of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January 2013.
24.
In 2016, Joy Harjo was appointed to the Chair of Excellence in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
25.
In 2019, Joy Harjo was named the United States Poet Laureate.
26.
Joy Harjo was the first Native American to be so appointed.
27.
Joy Harjo was the second United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to serve three terms.
28.
In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets.
29.
In 2022, Joy Harjo was appointed as the first artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
30.
In 2023, Joy Harjo was awarded Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.
31.
Joy Harjo has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, National Native American Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
32.
Joy Harjo has written numerous works in the genres of poetry, books, and plays.
33.
Joy Harjo uses Native American oral history as a mechanism for portraying these issues, and believes that "written text is, for [her], fixed orality".
34.
Joy Harjo published her first volume in 1975, titled The Last Song, which consisted of nine of her poems.
35.
Joy Harjo's poetry is included on a plaque on LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans.
36.
Joy Harjo is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and is the first Artist-in-Residence for Tulsa's Bob Dylan Center.
37.
Joy Harjo attended school at the Institute of Native American Arts in New Mexico where she worked to change the light in which Native American art was presented.
38.
Joy Harjo began writing poetry at twenty-two, and released her first book of poems called The Last Song, which started her career in writing.
39.
Joy Harjo has performed in Europe, South America, India, and Africa, as well as for a range of North American stages, including the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the Cultural Olympiad at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, DEF Poetry Jam, and the US Library of Congress in Washington DC.
40.
Joy Harjo began to play the saxophone at the age of 40.
41.
Joy 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.
42.
Joy Harjo is an active member of the Muscogee Nation and writes poetry as "a voice of the Indigenous people".
43.
Joy Harjo's poetry explores imperialism and colonization, and their effects on violence against women.
44.
Much of Joy Harjo's work reflects Creek values, myths, and beliefs.
45.
Joy Harjo reaches readers and audiences to bring realization of the wrongs of the past, not only for Native American communities but for oppressed communities in general.
46.
Joy Harjo believes that we become most human when we understand the connection among all living things.
47.
In 1995, Joy Harjo received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of The Americas.
48.
Joy Harjo is the recipient of the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award.
49.
In 2013, Joy Harjo received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Crazy Brave.
50.
Joy Harjo was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2014.
51.
Joy Harjo won the Wallace Stevens Award in Poetry by the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors in 2015 and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings was shortlsited for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.
52.
Joy Harjo won the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums Literary Award in 2019 and was named the United States Poet Laureate that same year.
53.
Joy Harjo won the Oklahoma Book Award for An American Sunrise in 2020.
54.
Joy Harjo was awarded the PEN Oakland 2021 Josephine Miles Award for When the Light of the World WasSubdued Our Songs Came Through.
55.
Joy Harjo received the 31st Annual Reading the West Book Award for Poetry for When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through in 2021.
56.
Joy Harjo was an inductee into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2021 and an inductee into the Native American Hall of Fame that same year.
57.
In 2021, Joy Harjo was designed as the 14th Oklahoma Cultural Treasure at the 44th Oklahoma Governor's Arts Awards.
58.
Joy Harjo received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.
59.
In 2024, Joy Harjo was given the Lumine Lifetime Achievement Award by the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma.
60.
Joy Harjo received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of St Andrews in 2024.
61.
Joy Harjo received aKettering Foundation Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship in 2025.
62.
Joy Harjo's poetry is included on plaque of LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans.
63.
In 1967 at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Joy Harjo met fellow student Phil Wilmon, with whom she had a son.
64.
Joy Harjo raised both her children as a single mother.
65.
Joy Harjo is married to Owen Chopoksa Sapulpa, and is stepmother to his children.