Crazy Brave

Speaker: 
Joy Harjo
 
01 Apr 2013
 
8:00 PM
 
Great Hall, Memorial Union

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Author, poet, and musician Joy Harjo is one of the leading Native American voices of our time. Her new memoir, Crazy Brave, is a tale of a hardscrabble youth, teenage motherhood, and her journey to becoming an internationally recognized writer and performer. Joy Harjo's body of work features seven books of poetry, including How We Became Human-New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses. She has also released four CDs of original music and in 2009 won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year. Her many other awards include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. The 2013 Richard Thompson Memorial Lecture and the 2013 English Department Goldtrap Lecture.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee/Mvskoke Nation. Her books include: The Last Song, 1975 What Moon Drove Me to This? 1979 She Had Some Horses 1984, 2008 Secrets from the Center of the World, 1989 In Mad Love and War, 1990 Fishing, 1991 The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, 1994 The Spiral of Memory, 1996 Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, 1997 The Good Luck Cat, 2000 A Map to the Next World, 2000 How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems, 2003 For a Girl Becoming, 2009 Joy Harjo also performs her poetry and plays saxophone with her band, Poetic Justice. She has performed with the Honor the Earth Tour with the Indigo Girls, at the Atlanta Olympics, on HBO Def Poetry Jam and Bill Moyer’s Power of the Word TV Series, at the Sundance Film Festival, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Her many honors include The American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.