Joy Harjo wins the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/joy-harjo

Joy has received the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry by the Academy of American Poets. About Harjo, Academy of American Poets Chancellor Alicia Ostiker said: “Throughout her extraordinary career as poet, storyteller, musician, memoirist, playwright and activist, Joy Harjo has worked to expand our American language, culture, and soul. A Creek Indian and student of First Nation history, Harjo is rooted simultaneously in the natural world, in earth—especially the landscape of the American southwest— and in the spirit world. Aided by these redemptive forces of nature and spirit, incorporating native traditions of prayer and myth into a powerfully contemporary idiom, her visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing.”

“The Academy of American Poets this year has awarded its highest honor, the Wallace Stevens Award, to Joy Harjo. The award is given “for proven mastery in the art of poetry.” — APWriter.org

Selection of Articles

http://www.nativepeoples.com/

http://www.tulsaworld.com

Associated Press

The Guardian

APWriter

Posted in: Awards