“Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world, nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.”
Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave: A Memoir
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light is a selection of fifty poems to celebrate three-term US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s fifty years as a poet. She is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the author of nine poetry collections and two memoirs, most recently Poet Warrior.
In this gemlike volume, Harjo selects her best poems from across fifty years, beginning with her early discoveries of her own voice and ending with moving reflections on our contemporary moment. Generous notes on each poem offer insight into Harjo’s inimitable poetics as she takes inspiration from Navajo horse songs and jazz, reckons with home and loss, and listens to the natural messengers of the earth. As evidenced in this transcendent collection, Joy Harjo’s “poetry is light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times.” (Sandra Cisneros, Millions).
Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, is a member of the Muscogee Nation and is only the second poet to be appointed to a third term as U.S. Poet Laureate. The author of nine poetry collections and two memoirs, most recently Poet Warrior, she is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Non-Fiction, and the American Book Award. Harjo is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for young Muscogee women, and is a founding board member and Chair of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma where she is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence of the Bob Dylan Center.
More about Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo’s website
NPR, October 9, 2021
Joy Harjo on inspiration behind memoir ‘Poet Warrior’
People, November 24, 2021
Poet Joy Harjo Says For ‘Indigenous Cultures’, the Land ‘Is the Keeper of Our Bones, Stories, and Songs’
The First Person with Michael Judge, April 19, 2022
‘Soul Talk’ With Joy Harjo
“Harjo, though very much a poet of America, extracts from her own personal and cultural touchstones a more galactal understanding of the world, and her poems become richer for it.”
THE NEW YORKER
Books
Copies of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light are available for preorder from White Whale Bookstore.