Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo ( HAR-joh; 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 a major figure in the second wave of the Native American literary 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 also the author of two memoirs: Crazy Brave: A Memoir (2012), awarded the PEN USA Literary Award and the American Book Award, and the highly acclaimed Poet Warrior: A Memoir (2021). 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.