Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2024 Frost Medal, Yale's 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.
The author of eleven books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, several plays, children's books, and non-fiction works, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Cloud Runner, Harjo's twelfth book of poetry, will be published by W.W. Norton in Fall of 2026.
As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced eight award-winning music albums. Her latest, Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, produced by Esperanza Spaulding, is now available through Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
Joy's prose publications include a book of short essays, Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age and a series of vignettes on writing, Catching the Light . She has edited three anthologies of Native literature, including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, Reinventing the Enemy's Language, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project.
Harjo holds the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship from the Kettering Foundation, and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma.
