Librarian of Congress Names Joy Harjo the Nation's 23rd Poet Laureate

Librarian of Congress Names Joy Harjo the Nation's 23rd Poet Laureate

Joy Harjo

Harjo, a Member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, Is the First Native American to Serve as U.S. Poet Laureate

LOC: 6.19.2019

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today announced the appointment of Joy Harjo as the nation’s 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2019-2020. Harjo will take up her duties in the fall, opening the Library’s annual literary season on Sept. 19 with a reading of her work in the Coolidge Auditorium.

Harjo is the first Native American poet to serve in the position – she is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She succeeds Tracy K. Smith, who served two terms as laureate.

“Joy Harjo has championed the art of poetry – ‘soul talk’ as she calls it – for over four decades,” Hayden said. “To her, poems are ‘carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and myth-making. Her work powerfully connects us to the earth and the spiritual world with direct, inventive lyricism that helps us reimagine who we are.”

Harjo ( @JoyHarjo ) currently lives in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is the nation’s first Poet Laureate from Oklahoma.  READ MORE >>

The Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress

Past Poets Laureate: 2011-present (from 1937)

Past Poet Laureate Projects