Joy Harjo ( ; born May 9, 1951) is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States poet laureate from 2019 to 2022, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms (after Robert Pinsky). Harjo is a seventh-generation descendant of Monahwee (also known as Menawa) of the Muscogee people. Additionally, Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation (Este Mvskokvlke) and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She 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.
Harjo is the author of twelve books of poetry, including her most recent, Cloud Runner (2026), Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light, which won the Yale Bollingen Prize, An American Sunrise, which won a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award, and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association.
In addition to poetry, Harjo has published several award-winning children’s books, including her most recent, Gathering the Light (2026), Remember, which received a 2024 American Indian Youth Literature Honor Award, and For a Girl Becoming, which was named an Honor Book by the American Library Association and won the Claudia Lewis Award for Younger Readers. Harjo is the author of two memoirs: Crazy Brave, awarded the PEN USA Literary Award and the American Book Award, and the highly acclaimed Poet Warrior: A Memoir. A book of short essays, Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age was released Fall of 2025. Harjo has edited several anthologies, including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through—A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced eight award-winning music albums, including Winding Through the Milky Way, for which she was awarded a NAMMY for Best Female Artist of the Year. Her latest album, Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, produced with esperanza spaulding, was released from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2026. Her musical plays include her one-woman show, “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light,” and “We Were There When Jazz Was Invented,” which premiered in 2025. Harjo performs nationally and internationally with her saxophone and flute, solo and with others.
Throughout her career, Harjo taught in numerous United States universities, including the University of New Mexico, UCLA, and the University of Tennessee. She currently holds the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship from the Kettering Foundation and serves as Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she lives.
She is the recipient of the 2024 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the 2023 Bollingen Prize, the 2023 Harper Lee Award, the 2023 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award from Americans for the Arts, a 2022 Leadership Award from the Academy of American Poets, a 2019 Jackson Prize from Poets & Writers, the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship, among other honors.
In 2019, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has since been inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, the National Women's Hall of Fame, and the Native American Hall of Fame. She was also designated the 14th Oklahoma Cultural Treasure at the 44th Oklahoma Governor's Arts Awards. Harjo founded For Girls Becoming, an art mentorship program for young Mvskoke women, and served as a founding board member and chair of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.
Her signature project as U.S. Poet Laureate was called Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry; it focused on "mapping the U.S. with Native Nations poets and poems".
Early life and education
Harjo was born on May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, Allen W. Foster, was an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Nation. Her mother was Wynema Baker Foster of Arkansas, who was of Irish, French, and Cherokee Nation descent. Harjo has stated that her mother and her maternal grandmother were not enrolled. Harjo is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Nation. Harjo's interest in the arts began fairly early. Her work is heavily inspired by the creativity of her mother, aunts, and grandmother, as well as her culture. Her first poem was written when she was in eighth grade.
At the age of 16, Harjo attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, which at the time was a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Harjo loved painting and found that it gave her a way to express herself. Harjo was inspired by her great-aunt, Lois Harjo Ball, who was a painter.
Harjo enrolled as a pre-med student the University of New Mexico. She changed her major to art after her first year. During her last year, she switched to creative writing, as she was inspired by different Native American writers including Simon J. Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko. Her first book of poems, called The Last Song, was published in 1975. Harjo earned her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1978. She also took filmmaking classes at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Career Harjo taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts from 1978 to 1979 and 1983 to 1984. She 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 2005 to 2010, the University of California Los Angeles in 1998 and from 2001 to 2005, the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast Low Residency MFA Program from 2011 to 2012, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2013 to 2016, and the University of Tennessee from 2016 to 2018. Her students at the University of New Mexico included future congressional representative and Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland.
Harjo has played alto saxophone with her band Poetic Justice, edited literary journals and anthologies, and written screenplays, plays, and children's books. Harjo performs with her saxophone and flutes, both solo and with players she calls the Arrow Dynamics Band.
In 1995, Harjo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. In 2002, Harjo received the PEN Beyond Margins Award for A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales.
In 2008, she served as a founding member of the board of directors for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, for which she also served as board chair.
Harjo joined the faculty of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in January 2013. In 2016, Harjo was appointed to the Chair of Excellence in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee.
In 2018, Harjo was awarded a Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
In 2019, Harjo was named the United States Poet Laureate. She was the first Native American to be so appointed. She was also the second United States Poet Laureate to serve three terms.
In 2019, Harjo was appointed to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. In 2022, Harjo was appointed as the first artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In 2023, Harjo was awarded Yale University's Bollingen Prize.
Harjo has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, National Native American Hall of Fame, Oklahoma Hall of Fame, American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Literature and performance Harjo has written numerous works of poetry, books, and plays. Harjo's works often include themes such as defining the self, the arts, and social justice.
Harjo often uses Native American oral history and believes that "written text is, for [her], fixed orality". Her use of the oral tradition is prevalent through her various literature readings and musical performances. Her methods of continuing oral tradition include storytelling, singing, and voice inflection in order to captivate the attention of her audiences. While reading poetry, she claims that "[she] starts not even with an image but a sound".
Her first memoir, Crazy Brave, was awarded the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Non Fiction and the American Book Award, and her second, Poet Warrior, was released from W.W. Norton in fall 2021.
She has published three award-winning children's books, The Good Luck Cat, For a Girl Becoming, and Remember; a collaboration with photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom; three anthologies of writing by North American Indigenous writers; several screenplays and collections of prose interviews and essays; and three plays, including Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, which she toured as a one-woman show and which was published by Wesleyan Press.
Harjo is executive editor of the anthology When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project featuring a sampling of work by 47 Native American poets through an interactive ArcGIS story map and a Library of Congress audio collection.
Poetry She began writing poetry at twenty-two, and released her first book of poems called The Last Song, which consisted of nine of her poems and started her career in writing. Harjo's third collection, She Had Some Horses, focused on animals important to Indigenous cultures, particularly horses. Harjo has authored ten books of poetry, including An American Sunrise (2019), which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award winner; Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and named a Notable Book by the American Library Association; and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her collection Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022) celebrates the previous 50 years of writing poetry since her first publication.
Harjo's awards for poetry include a 2024 Frost Medal, the 2022 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, a PEN USA Literary Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writers' Award, the Poets & Writers Jackson Poetry Prize, a Rasmuson US Artist Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her poetry is included on a plaque on LUCY, a NASA spacecraft launched in Fall 2021 and the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojans.
Music
As a musician, Harjo has released seven CDs. These feature both her original music and that of other Native American artists.
Since her first album, the spoken word Letter From the End of the Twentieth Century (2003), and her 1998 solo album Native Joy for Real, Harjo has received numerous awards and honors for her music, including a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the year for her 2008 album, Winding Through the Milky Way. I Pray for My Enemies is Joy Harjo's seventh album, released in 2021.