Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022. Harjo is the author of eleven books of poetry, including 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. Her twelfth book of poetry Cloud Runner will be published by W.W. Norton Fall of 2026.
In addition to poetry, she has published several award-winning children’s books, three plays, and two memoirs: Crazy Brave, awarded the PEN USA Literary Award and the American Book Award, and the highly acclaimed Poet Warrior. A third memoir is in the works. Harjo has also edited several anthologies., including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through—A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. A book of short essays, Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age is released Fall of 2025.
As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced several 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 next album, Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, co-produced with Esperanza Spalding, will be released Spring of 2026 from Folkways.
Harjo has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Native
American Hall of Fame, and the National Women’s Hall of Fame. The recipient of the
2024 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, her other 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, the Jackson Prize, and a National Humanities Medal.
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, where she lives.
