An Interview with Joy Harjo at As Us Literary Journal

Joy Harjo talks poetry and writing with As Us: Indigenous Women's Literary Journal. Harjo is teaching a poetry master class at the 15th annual Taos Summer Writer's Conference. There is one spot left. Click here for more information.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is an internationally known poet, performer, writer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. Her seven books of poetry include such well-known titles as How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses, all published by W.W. Norton. Her poetry has garnered many awards including the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, 1998 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Harjo's memoir, Crazy Brave (W.W. Norton, 2012), tells of her journey to becoming a poet and 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 proze" by Ms Magazine . Soul Talk, Song Language (2011) is a collection of Harjo's essays and interviews was published by Wesleyan Press. She co-edited an anthology of contemporary Native women's writing:Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Native Women's Writing of North America, 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.