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The new poet laureate of the United States is Joy Harjo (2019). Read a Q&A with Harjo about her laureateship.

The poet laureate of the United States is appointed annually by the Librarian of Congress. Over the course of the one-year term, which lasts from September to May, the U.S. poet laureate presents a reading and lecture at the Library of Congress and often engages in a community-oriented poetry project with national reach.

This position was originated in 1936 by a philanthropist named Archer M. Huntington, who endowed “a chair of Poetry of the English language in the Library of Congress.” The following year, Joseph Auslander became the first “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.” He served in this role until 1941, when Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress at the time, instituted a one-year term for the consultantship and appointed Allen Tate as Auslander’s successor.

Poets in this position were called “Consultants in Poetry” through 1986, when the title was officially changed to that of “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.” Since 1950, many poets laureate have also been appointed to serve a second term. (You can find more information about the poet laureateship and former poets laureate at the Library of Congress.)

2019 U.S. Poet Laureate: Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo was appointed the new United States poet laureate in June 2019, and is the first Native American Poet Laureate in the history of the position. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 9, 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She received a BA from the University of New Mexico before earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1978. Harjo is a poet, musician, and playwright. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise (W. W. Norton, 2019); The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (W. W. Norton, 1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; and In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her memoir Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton, 2012) won the 2013 PEN Center USA literary award for creative nonfiction. Harjo has also published collections of interviews and conversations, children's books, and collaborative art texts.

In 2015 she received the Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry from the Academy of American Poets. About Harjo, Chancellor Alicia Ostiker said, “Throughout her extraordinary career as poet, storyteller, musician, memoirist, playwright and activist, Joy Harjo has worked to expand our American language, culture, and soul. A Creek Indian and student of First Nation history, Harjo is rooted simultaneously in the natural world, in earth—especially the landscape of the American southwest—and in the spirit world. Aided by these redemptive forces of nature and spirit, incorporating native traditions of prayer and myth into a powerfully contemporary idiom, her visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing.”

Also a performer, Harjo plays saxophone and flutes with the Arrow Dynamics Band and solo, and previously with the band Poetic Justice. She has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam in venues across the U.S. and internationally and has released four award-winning albums. In 2009, she won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year.

In 2015, Harjo gave The Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics, which is offered annually in New York City by a prominent poet, called “Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets.” Her other honors include the 2019 Jackson Poetry Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. She has also received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2019, Harjo was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. On this occasion, Academy Chancellor Marilyn Chin said “[Joy] is an iconic and beloved multi- genre artist. Her poetry, prose, and music have delighted, informed, and tantalized an international audience for over four decades. Her poetry displays a strong commitment to her social and political ideals as she fights tirelessly for Native American justice, ending violence against women, and a variety of important issues. Her masterful spiritual grace always shines through with compassion and forgiveness. Her poetry is a timeless gift to the world.” In addition to serving as U.S. Poet Laureate, Harjo directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for young Mvskoke women, and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She was the guest editor for Poem-a-Day in April 2020 and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Bibliography

Poetry An American Sunrise (W. W. Norton, 2019) Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015) How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002) A Map to the Next World: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2000) The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (W. W. Norton, 1994) In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990) Secrets from the Center of the World (University of Arizona Press, 1989) She Had Some Horses (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983; W. W. Norton, 2008) What Moon Drove Me to This? (Reed Books, 1979) The Last Song (Puerto del Sol Press, 1975)

Prose Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton, 2012) Soul Talk, Soul Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo (Wesleyan University Press, 2011) For a Girl Becoming (Sun Tracks, 2009) The Spiral of Memory: Interviews (Poets on Poetry) (University of Michigan Press, 1995)

Drama Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses (Wesleyan University Press, 2019)