Photo credit: Karen Kuehn
Past recipients of the award include a veritable "who's who" of American poets, including John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, and James Tate. It is wonderful to see Joy taking her well-deserved place in this community of poets!
The very apt citation from Academy of American Poets Chancellor Alicia Ostriker reads as follows:
“Throughout her extraordinary career as poet, storyteller, musician, memoirist, playwright and activist, Joy Harjo has worked to expand our American language, culture, and soul. A Creek Indian and student of First Nation history, Harjo is rooted simultaneously in the natural world, in earth—especially the landscape of the American southwest— and in the spirit world. Aided by these redemptive forces of nature and spirit, incorporating native traditions of prayer and myth into a powerfully contemporary idiom, her visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing.”
Those of us here in Champaign-Urbana will have the opportunity to see Joy read from her work next Wednesday, September 16 at the auditorium of the Spurlock Museum at 7:30--an event hosted by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Please join us and take the opportunity to congratulate Joy Harjo!