Gary Price // Librarian of Congress Names Joy Harjo the Nation’s 23rd Poet Laureate, First Native American Poet to Serve in the Position | LJ infoDOCKET

20.6.19

Librarian of Congress Names Joy Harjo the Nation’s 23rd Poet Laureate, First Native American Poet to Serve in the Position | LJ infoDOCKET: Harjo is the first Native American poet to serve in the position – she is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She succeeds Tracy K. Smith, who served two terms as laureate.

“Joy Harjo has championed the art of poetry – ‘soul talk’ as she calls it – for over four decades,” Hayden said. “To her, poems are ‘carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and myth-making. Her work powerfully connects us to the earth and the spiritual world with direct, inventive lyricism that helps us reimagine who we are.”

Harjo currently lives in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is the nation’s first Poet Laureate from Oklahoma.