BOOK LAUNCH + READING
AN EVENING WITH JOY HARJO
Monday, December 1, 2025
Door 6:00 PM | Reading + Discussion 7:00-8:00 PM
Oklahoma Center for the Humanities - The University of Tulsa, 101 Archer St. Tulsa, OK
Bob Dylan Center, Magic City Books, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and The University of Tulsa's Oklahoma Center for the Humanities are proud to present a special event with Joy Harjo to celebrate the publication of her latest book, Girl Warrior. Joy will be in conversation with Mvskoke scholar and educator Sarah Price.
“To know ourselves is the most profound and difficult endeavor. Though we are all made of the same questions, we have individual routes to the answers, or to reframing the questions. Why is there evil in the world? Why do people suffer, and some more than others? Why are we here? What are we doing here? What happens after death? Does anything mean anything at all? Who am I and what does it matter?” writes Joy Harjo, renowned poet and activist, in this profound work about the struggles, challenges, and joys of coming of age.
ABOUT GIRL WARRIOR
In her best-selling memoir Poet Warrior, Harjo led readers through her lifelong process of artistic evolution. In Girl Warrior, she speaks directly to Native girls and women, sharing stories about her own coming of age to bring renewed attention to the pivotal moments of becoming, including forgiveness, failure, falling, rising up, and honoring our vast family of beings.
Informed by her own experiences and those of her ancestors, Harjo offers inspiration and insight for navigating the many challenges of maturation. She grapples with parents, friendships, love, and loss. She guides young readers toward painting, poetry, and music as powerful tools for developing their own ethical sensibility. As Harjo demonstrates, the act of making is an essential part of who we are, a means of inviting the past into the present, and a critical tool young women can use to shape a more just future.
“Joy Harjo combines the wisdom that was here long before Europeans showed up with the challenges of a woman’s life in the present. The result is inspired by the past and a personal preparation for the future.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019-2022 and is winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2024 Frost Medal, Yale's 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.
The author of eleven books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, several plays, children's books, and non-fiction works, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. She has edited three anthologies of Native literature, including When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, Reinventing the Enemy's Language, and Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project.
Harjo holds the Ruth Yellowhawk Fellowship from the Kettering Foundation, is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center, and is a Tulsa Artist Fellowship awardee. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Sarah Price is a Mvskoke citizen and a daughter of Kaccvlke, the Tiger Clan, with deep roots in her lifelong home of Indian Territory—present-day Oklahoma. As an Education Specialist for the Bureau of Indian Education, she has over a decade of experience navigating federal, state, and tribal education systems. Committed to decolonizing praxis and uplifting feminine vocality, Sarah is a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University, where her research constellates Indigenous feminisms, rematriation, and cultural futurity.
“What a beautiful and brilliant call to arms. I wish I had Joy Harjo’s words when I was young. This book is a lovely ode to her own bravery and by extension, all of ours. Girl Warrior gives possibility to young people (and all people) through Joy Harjo’s own coming-of-age narrative. More than about having waded through tumultuous waters and survived to not only tell the story but thrive inside the people we become on the other side. This book is simply a balm. ”