Suzi F. Garcia in Conversation with Joy Harjo

Today on the podcast: Joy Harjo. Harjo is the nation's first Native American poet laureate and a playwright, musician, author, and editor. Not everyone knows that Harjo also started playing saxophone at the age of forty. Today, we have the pleasure of hearing from her new album, I Pray for My Enemies, which features musicians from some of the biggest bands of the nineties grunge scene—including R.E.M., Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. We also spoke with Harjo about her early activism, how she came to befriend Audre Lorde, her obsession with maps, and her new memoir, Poet Warrior. The memoir celebrates the influences that shaped Harjo’s poetry and reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland. She writes about her sixth-generation grandfather, who survived the Trail of Tears, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member. 

Harjo has been creating her own maps for decades—with her poetry, the way she lives in the world, and recently, with the project Living Nations, Living Words, a collaboration with the Library of Congress and her signature project as United States Poet Laureate. It’s an online map where poems by Native Nations poets can be heard. The conversation starts with how Harjo found poetry.