Bookworks, The City Of Albuquerque, And WordCraft Circle Present Joy Harjo

Bookworks, the City of Albuquerque Cultural Services, and WordCraft Circle present Joy Harjo, United States Poet Laureate, on December 7 at the KiMo Theater. The event will be free and open to the public, but requires registration. The reading starts at 8 pm, with a signing to follow.

Harjo will be in Albuquerque reading from her new book of poetry, American Sunrise, just out from W.W. Norton. Harjo will sign books after the reading. Entry in the signing line requires purchase of her new poetry collection, American Sunrise from Bookworks. Books can be purchased and more information about the event and registration can be found at bkwrks.com/joy-harjo

"We are honored to be presenting Joy Harjo, now as our national ambassador for poetry and a longtime friend and neighbor of Bookworks. We couldn't be more excited to be collaborating with the City of Albuquerque to host her at the historic KiMo Theater. We think this will be a night for all poetry fans to remember," says Amanda Sutton, events and marketing director for Bookworks.

From W.W. Norton, about American Sunrise:

"In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest--and most complicated--poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection."

"[Harjo's] poetry is light and elixir, the very best prescription for us in wounded times," says Sandra Cisneros, author of House on Mango Street.

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Creek Nation and was named United States Poet Laureate in 2019. Harjo's nine books of poetry include An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo's memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. Harjo's latest is a book of poetry from Norton, An American Sunrise. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.