MULTIDISCIPLINARY

JOY HARJO

Tulsa Artist Fellowship Alum-in-Residence

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, writer, musician, performer, and artist of the Muscogee Nation. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harjo served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States (2019–2022), becoming the first Native American to hold the position.

Across poetry, music, performance, memoir, theater, and visual art, Harjo’s expansive practice is grounded in story, memory, place, and the relationships between people, land, and the more-than-human world. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including An American Sunrise, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, and Cloud Runner: Poems, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in October 2026. Her acclaimed memoirs include Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, and her newest children’s book, Gathering the Light, illustrated by Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley, will be published in September 2026.

Harjo is also an award-winning musician and performer whose work brings poetry into conversation with jazz, Indigenous musical traditions, and improvisation. She has produced seven award-winning albums and performs internationally with saxophone and flute. Her newest album, Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, co-produced with Esperanza Spalding and released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2026, continues her lifelong exploration of poetry and music as interconnected forms.

Her many honors include the National Humanities Medal, Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Harjo has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Native American Hall of Fame, and the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Harjo is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa Artist Fellowship’s neighbor in the Tulsa Arts District. Her residency there has encompassed music, poetry, performance, and curatorial work, including co-curating Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem, an exhibition celebrating the life and legacy of the influential Kiowa guitarist.

A former Tulsa Artist Fellow, Harjo returned to the Fellowship in 2026 as an Alum-in-Residence, rejoining the studio community as she continues developing a new body of work in painting alongside her writing, music, and interdisciplinary practice.

Harjo lives and works on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma.