{"id":40512,"date":"2026-11-01T00:33:01","date_gmt":"2026-11-01T05:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/unitedresourceconnection.org\/cannon-ball-nd-58528\/joy-harjo-releases-new-poetry-book\/"},"modified":"2026-11-01T00:33:02","modified_gmt":"2026-11-01T05:33:02","slug":"joy-harjo-releases-new-poetry-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitedresourceconnection.org\/cannon-ball-nd-58528\/joy-harjo-releases-new-poetry-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Joy Harjo releases new poetry book \u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Author Joy Harjo<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Article courtesy of West River Eagle<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI started writing to save my life,\u201d writes Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as the United States Poet Laureate. Her latest poetry book, Cloud Runner, is a homage to the bond between mother and child and moves through her grief about losing her daughter to cancer. In it, she blends personal grief with Indigenous (Muscogee) mythos and epistemologies, in an immersive, musical experience that explores how all grief may be connected.<\/p>\n

Cloud Runner is a book about loss, grief, and how art can transform suffering. Her poetry is an essential witness to history at this time when we, as a society, are experiencing so much loss, from political violence to mass shootings, to missing and murdered Native women, to climate disaster.<\/p>\n

Harjo is a multi-award-winning musician, author, screenwriter, and playwright, as well as a poet. She has written twelve poetry books, two memoirs, and three children\u2019s books, has served as the twenty-third U.S. Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022, and was only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms.<\/p>\n

Harjo\u2019s work is deeply concerned with remembrance, tradition, politics, and the transformational aspects of poetry, and includes themes such as the arts, defining the self, and social justice. She often uses Native American oral history in her literature readings and musical performances \u2013 in which she includes singing, voice inflection and storytelling.<\/p>\n

Harjo also explores colonization and imperialism, and their effects on violence against women. Believing that colonialism led to Native American women being oppressed within their own communities, Harjo encourages political equality between the sexes. Her activism for feminism and Native American rights blossom from her belief in unity and the lack of separation among plants, animals, humans, the earth, and sky.<\/p>\n

She asserts, \u201cRemember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems\u2026. There is no separation. We are all from the same place. As long as there is respect and acknowledgement of connections, things continue working. When that stops, we all die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1951, Harjo now lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma. She is a seventh-generation descendant of Monahwee (also known as Menawa) of the Muscogee people, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation, and a major figure in the second wave of the Native American literary renaissance of the late twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Studying at the Institute of American Indian Arts, which was at the time a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Harjo later completed her undergraduate degree at the University of New Mexico, and her MFA in the renowned University of Iowa creative writing program. She began writing in response to Native empowerment movements, and has taught poetry at a plethora of universities.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, one of Harjo\u2019s students at the University of New Mexico was future congressional representative and Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland \u2013 who is now the Democrats\u2019 candidate for Governor of New Mexico.<\/p>\n

Harjo, truly a renaissance woman, also acts (including having acted in a one-woman show that she toured), paints, and has performed music and poetry nationally and internationally. She plays the saxophone and flutes, solo and with her Arrow Dynamics Band, and has produced seven award-winning music albums.<\/p>\n

Harjo relates, \u201cThe saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then, you take a breath all the way from the center of the earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven. All that love we humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harjo\u2019s poetry is accessible and moving. In her art, she likes to \u201clisten beyond what\u2019s most obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says, \u201cTalking about fear, I think about collective fear\u2026Collectively, there\u2019s so much anxiety\u2026Suicide rates are up. What happens if you start reacting to fear? That\u2019s a whole different thing than acting with curiosity\u2026and that\u2019s where poetry can come in \u2013 it\u2019s a tool for (managing fear by saying) \u2026 \u2018Okay, what is this? Okay, let\u2019s just stop here. I\u2019m going to sit you down here, Fear\u2026and I\u2019m going to see what you have to say. What in the hell is going on?\u2019 \u2026It changes and there\u2019s a relationship\u2026And maybe that\u2019s the key\u2026that there becomes a relationship\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cYou start understanding that you have a relationship and you have a voice and a shift of how maybe fear can work in your life\u2026Taking curiosity and maybe that\u2019s one of the main things is a curiosity for even what disturbs you or what you understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harjo uses her poetry to speak what is, for many people, unspeakable and nearly impossible to carry. She says, \u201cAt least I\u2019ve had to come to that in my life, to realize that this stuff called failure, this stuff, this debris of historical trauma, family trauma, you know, stuff that can kill your spirit, is actually raw material to make things with and to build a bridge. You can use those materials to build a bridge over that which would destroy you.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says, \u201cThe trick is how do we want to make it through\u2026I think that the theme that we\u2019re going to look back at this age and see is: Okay, everybody needs to know and understand how to come together\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cDiversity is life\u2026That is creativity, and that the theme of the age is, how do we work together and move together with compassion and love\u2026with our differences? With our different ways, our different systems. How do we move collectively in a way that is nourishing?\u201d<\/p>\n

Harjo points out, \u201cTrue power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others\u2026Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harjo calls poetry \u201csoul talk.\u201d Through her arts and activism, she has let her soul speak more than many people speak in ten lifetimes. She wisely says, \u201cIf you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.\u201d<\/p>\n

The post Joy Harjo releases new poetry book \u00a0<\/a> first appeared on Native Sun News Today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 Author Joy Harjo Article courtesy of West River Eagle \u201cI started writing to save my life,\u201d writes Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as the United States Poet Laureate. Her latest poetry book, Cloud Runner, is a homage to the bond between mother and child and moves <\/p>\n

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Shared by Native Sun News Today<\/a> November 1, 2026<\/p>\n

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