Giulianna Lalomio
Special to The Villager
Are you a fan of poetry, art or music? Then you are in luck! Join SUNY Fredonia in welcoming Joy Harjo to its campus from 5-6:30pm on Thursday, April 2, in the Juliet J. Rosch Recital Hall located in Mason Hall.
The Williams Distinguished Visiting Professorship and the Mary Louise White Visiting Writers Series, both established through the Fredonia College Foundation, are excited to have Ms. Harjo share her poetry and stories in Rosch and then join the audience for a more informal reception at the Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery in Rockefeller Arts Center. Ms. Harjo’s event is to be included in SUNY Fredonia’s ongoing Bicentennial, which recognizes and celebrates the campus’s role in the greater community and aims to extend that celebration to influential people who can share their impact with Fredonia. Along with Ms. Harjo’s talk, the reception will also offer participants a chance to view her portrait and the displayed poems included in the B.A. Van Sise exhibit, “Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry.”
Both parts of the event are free and open to the public. Tickets are required for the talk, and a 2-ticket limit per person has been set. They are available at the Fredonia Ticket Office in the Williams Center, online, and by phone at (716) 673-3501. Please note there is a $6 service fee per order for online and phone sales, and a 2-ticket limit per order.
Laureate for three terms, has also made numerous contributions as a memoir
and children’s book author and has even written several plays. As with most
of her work, the memoirs are grounded in music, poetry and spirituality and
explore trauma as well as honoring ancestral roots. A full list of her books and
poetry can be found here * https://bluefl owerarts.com/artist/joy-harjo/.
Ms. Harjo, known nationally for previously holding the role of the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate for three terms, has also made numerous contributions as a memoir and children’s book author and has even written several plays. Her status as the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate broke barriers and provided an outstanding platform to advocate for Indigenous people, with a special focus on her own community, the Muscogee Nation. Her honors include Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and the first Artist-in-Residence at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she lives.
The children’s books by Ms. Harjo include “The Good Luck Cat,” “For a Girl Becoming” and “Remember.” The two most recent, written in 2009 and 2023, received literary recognition with the Pura Belpré Award and American Indian Youth Literature Honor Award. Her two memoirs, named “Crazy Brave” and “Poet Warrior,” detail her journey as an artist, Indigenous woman and, a theme that often appears in her poetry, a mother. As with most of her work, the memoirs are grounded in music, poetry and spirituality and explore trauma as well as honoring ancestral roots. A full list of her books and poetry can be found online https://blueflowerarts.com/artist/joy-harjo/.
Beyond her written work, in the early 1990s, Ms. Harjo founded the reggae-tribal-jazz-rock band, Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice, and since then has performed solo and released seven music albums. According to her website, Ms. Harjo performs with her saxophone and flutes, sometimes solo but other times with pulled-together players she calls the “Arrow Dynamics Band.” As far as coverage goes, she has performed in Europe, South America, India, and Africa, as well as for a range of North American stages, including the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the Cultural Olympiad at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Def Poetry Jam, the International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia, and the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
Ms. Harjo has received much recognition and admiration from the press, including well-known publisher TIME Magazine that published an article in 2022 titled, “Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in October,” and featured Ms. Harjo’s “Catching the Light,” saying, “she has written something of a memoir… about the “why” of writing poetry.”
We can’t wait to see what Joy Harjo can share with our community next month, and we hope to see you there!