Harjo taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts from 1978 to 1979 and 1983 to 1984. She taught at
Arizona State University from 1980 to 1981, the
University of Colorado from 1985 to 1988, the
University of Arizona from 1988 to 1990, the
University of New Mexico from 1991 to 1997 and later from 2005 to 2010, UCLA in 1998 and from 2001 to 2005, the
University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast Low Residency MFA Program from 2011 to 2012,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from 2013 to 2016, and
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, from 2016 to 2018. Harjo has played
alto saxophone with her band Poetic Justice, edited literary journals and anthologies, and written screenplays, plays, and children's books. Harjo performs now with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with pulled-together players she often calls the Arrow Dynamics Band. In 1995, Harjo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the
Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. In 2002, Harjo received the
PEN/Beyond Margins Award for
A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales. In 2008, she served as a founding member of the board of directors for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, for which she serves as a member of its National Advisory Council. In 2008, Harjo had her poetry collection,
She Had Some Horses, published first as a Norton paperback. In 2016, Harjo was appointed to the Chair of Excellence in the Department of English at the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In 2018, Harjo was awarded a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. In 2019, Harjo was appointed board chair for the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation. In 2019, Harjo was named the United States Poet Laureate. She was the first Native American to be so appointed. She was also the second United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to serve three terms. In 2019, Harjo was appointed Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets. In 2022, Harjo was appointed as the first artist-in-residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2023, Harjo was awarded Yale's Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Harjo has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, National Native American Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Literature and performance Harjo has written numerous works in the genres of poetry, books, and plays. Harjo's works often include themes such as defining self, the arts, and social justice. Harjo uses Native American
oral history as a mechanism for portraying these issues, and believes that "written text is, for [her], fixed orality". Her use of the oral tradition is prevalent through various literature readings and musical performances conducted by Harjo. Her methods of continuing oral tradition include storytelling, singing, and voice inflection in order to captivate the attention of her audiences. While reading poetry, she claims that "[she] starts not even with an image but a sound," which is indicative of her oral traditions expressed in performance. Harjo published her first volume in 1975, titled
The Last Song, which consisted of nine of her poems. Harjo has since authored ten books of poetry, including her most recent,
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years (2022), the highly acclaimed
An American Sunrise (2019), which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner;
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the
American Library Association; and
In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an
American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her first memoir,
Crazy Brave, was awarded the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Non Fiction and the American Book Award, and her second,
Poet Warrior, was released from W.W. Norton in Fall 2021. She has published three award-winning children's books,
The Good Luck Cat, For a Girl Becoming, and
Remember; a collaboration with photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom; three anthologies of writing by North American Native Nations writers; several screenplays and collections of prose interviews and essays, and three plays, including
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, A Play, which she toured as a one-woman show and was published by Wesleyan Press.
Poetry Harjo's interest in the arts began fairly early. As an adolescent, she started painting as a way to express herself. She attended school at the Institute of Native American Arts in New Mexico where she worked to change the light in which Native American art was presented. From there, she became a creative writing major in college and focused on her passion of poetry after listening to Native American poets. She began writing poetry at twenty-two, and released her first book of poems called
The Last Song, which started her career in writing. Harjo's third collection,
She Had Some Horses, introduced multiple definitions to a variety of indigenous related animals. The main animal being the horses highlighted in the title of, She
Had Some Horses. Harjo's definition of horses is not basic but instead has such a deeper meaning. According to Harjo, horses not only had connections with her family but also are connected to the ancestors, and many other aspects of nature. In the introduction of Harjo's book, she describes horses: “Horses, like the rest of us, can transform and be transformed. A horse could be a streak of sunrise, a body of sand, a moment of ecstasy. A horse could be all of this at the same time. Or a horse might be nothing at all but the imagination of the wind” (Harjo x). Since her first album, a spoken word classic
Letter From the End of the Twentieth Century (2003) and her 1998 solo album
Native Joy for Real, Harjo has received numerous awards and recognitions for her music, including a
Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the year for her 2008 album,
Winding Through the Milky Way. I Pray for My Enemies is Joy Harjo's seventh and newest album, released in 2021. Harjo performs with her saxophone and flutes, solo and with pulled-together players she often calls the Arrow Dynamics Band
. She has performed in Europe, South America, India, and Africa, as well as for a range of North American stages, including the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the Cultural Olympiad at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, DEF Poetry Jam, and the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
Activism In addition to her creative writing, Harjo has written and spoken about US political and
Native American affairs. She is also an active member of the
Muscogee Nation and writes poetry as "a voice of the Indigenous people". Harjo's poetry explores imperialism and colonization, and their effects on violence against women. Scholar Mishuana Goeman writes, "The rich intertextuality of Harjo's poems and her intense connections with other and awareness of Native issues- such as sovereignty, racial formation, and social conditions- provide the foundation for unpacking and linking the function of settler colonial structures within newly arranged global spaces". In her poems, Harjo often explores her
Muskogee/Creek background and spirituality in opposition to popular mainstream culture. In a thesis at Iowa University, Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza writes about Harjo: "Native American continuation in the face of colonization is the undercurrent of Harjo's poetics through poetry, music, and performance." Much of Harjo's work reflects Creek values, myths, and beliefs. Harjo reaches readers and audiences to bring realization of the wrongs of the past, not only for Native American communities but for oppressed communities in general. Her activism for Native American rights and feminism stem from her belief in unity and the lack of separation among human, animal, plant, sky, and earth. Harjo believes that we become most human when we understand the connection among all living things. She believes that colonialism led to Native American women being oppressed within their own communities, and she works to encourage more political equality between the sexes. Of contemporary American poetry, Harjo said, "I see and hear the presence of generations making poetry through the many cultures that express America. They range from ceremonial orality which might occur from spoken word to European fixed forms; to the many classic traditions that occur in all cultures, including theoretical abstract forms that find resonance on the page or in image. Poetry always directly or inadvertently mirrors the state of the state either directly or sideways.
Terrance Hayes's American sonnets make a stand as post-election love poems.
Layli Long Soldier's poems emerge from fields of
Lakota history where centuries stack and bleed through making new songs. The sacred and profane tangle and are threaded into the lands guarded by the four sacred mountains in the poetry of
Sherwin Bitsui. America has always been multicultural, before the term became ubiquitous, before colonization, and it will be after." ==Awards and recognition==