Author Biography
Joy Harjo is a world-renowned writer, poet and musician, and a citizen of the Mvskoke Nation, located in Oklahoma, USA. She served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022, the first Indigenous poet to hold this position.
Joy Harjo is a leading figure in Native American literature in the United States, as well as in American literature more broadly. She began publishing her poetry in the second half of the 1970s. She is the author of several plays, works of children’s literature, essays on literature and poetry, and several autobiographical works, including Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012) and Poet Warrior (Norton, 2021). Above all, she is the author of ten books of poetry, including Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (Norton, 2022), Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (Norton, 2015), How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2004), She Had Some Horses (Thunders Mouth Press, 1997), and An American Sunrise (Norton, 2019). In October 2025, she published Girl Warrior: A Coming of Age Handbook (Norton). She has also edited three anthologies of Native literature, including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through – A Norton Anthology of Native Nations poetry, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry.
Joy Harjo is also a saxophonist and has released several music albums, the most recent of which, Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, was released in 2026.
She is the recipient of countless literary and musical awards. In 2025, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Bordeaux Montaigne University.
