Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Creek Nation and was named United States Poet Laureate in 2019. The author of eight books of poetry and a memoir, Crazy Brave, her many honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award. She is the author of An American Sunrise: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company), informed by her tribal history and connection to the land. In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise Poems (W. W. Norton & Company), Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. Joy Harjo’s play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light (University of Wesleyan Press) is the centerpiece of this collection that includes essays and interviews concerning the roots and the reaches of contemporary Native Theater. Harjo blends storytelling, music, movement, and poetic language in a healing ceremony that chronicles the challenges young protagonist Redbird faces on her path to healing and self-determination
