page_title: Joy Harjo
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Joy Harjo / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Poet Joy Harjo - Tallahassee, Florida.
context_page_description: Joy Harjo is a poet, musician, playwright, and author. She is the incumbent United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. 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 at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
  In addition to writing books and other publications, Harjo has taught in numerous United States universities, performed at poetry readings and music events, and released five albums of her original music. Harjo is the author of nine books of poetry, and two award-winning children's books, The Good Luck Cat and For a Girl Becoming. Her books include An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, Crazy Brave, and How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975–2002. She was a recipient of the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 2019, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
context_section_description: Harjo was born on May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The first of four children, Harjo’s birth name was Joy Foster. Her father, Allen W. Foster, was Muscogee Creek, and her mother, Wynema Baker Foster, has mixed-race ancestry of Cherokee, French, and Irish. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
  At age 16, Harjo attended an Institute of American Indian Arts, then a BIA boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for high school. Harjo loved painting and found that it gave her a way to express herself.
  Harjo enrolled at the University of New Mexico and started in pre-med. She changed her major to art after her first year. During her last year, she switched to creative writing to write poetry, as she was inspired by different Native American writers. She graduated in 1976. Harjo earned her master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1978. The poet also attended the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to take classes on filmmaking.
  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, and the University of New Mexico from 1991 to 1995.
  Harjo has played alto saxophone with the band Poetic Justice, edited literary journals, and written screenplays.
  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 serves as a member of its National Advisory Council.
  Harjo joined the faculty of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at 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, Knoxville.
  In 2019, Harjo was named the United States Poet Laureate. She is the first Native American to be so appointed.
caption: Harjo in 1986.
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