Joy Harjo (photo by Matika Wilbur)
SUNY Fredonia will welcome 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo as its Williams Distinguished Visiting Professor on Thursday, April 2.
Ms. Harjo will give a talk in the Juliet J. Rosch Recital Hall at 5 p.m. and then attend a reception at the Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery in Rockefeller Arts Center, where her portrait and poem are included in B.A. Van Sise’s exhibit, “Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry,” that features many of the most renowned poets working today.
Both events 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.
Sponsors of Harjo’s campus visit are the Williams Visiting Professorship Fund and Mary Louise White Visiting Writers Series, both established through the Fredonia College Foundation, and is part of the university’s Bicentennial series of events.
An internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation, Harjo served three terms as the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, from 2019 to 2022, and is the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate. She won the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medial, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and was recently the recipient of a National Humanities Medal.
“At a time when it's easy to get lost in ugly words and the deluge of bad and fake news, it's truly delightful to welcome a poet who has made a career of describing the world beautifully. Joy Harjo doesn't shy away from hard subjects, but she uses her words to create and connect,” said Department of English Chair KimMarie Cole.
Harjo writes and performs with an attention to sound, breath and rhythm that celebrates oral tradition and makes poetry a living, communal experience, observed Adjunct Lecturer Stephine Hunt.
“Engaging with her work challenges readers and listeners to reconsider dominant narratives of American history and to recognize Indigenous presence not as past, but as vital, enduring, and shaping the present.” - Adjunct Lecturer Stephine Hunt
“In the contemporary United States — amid ongoing struggles over land, sovereignty, racial justice and historical erasure — Harjo’s voice and work are especially urgent. Her poetry insists on truth-telling, survival and responsibility to ancestors and future generations, while also offering pathways toward healing and imagination,” noted Ms. Hunt, also a SUNY Fredonia alumna.
“Engaging with her work challenges readers and listeners to reconsider dominant narratives of American history and to recognize Indigenous presence not as past, but as vital, enduring and shaping the present,” Hunt added.
Harjo’s visit coincides with the reading of the anthology she assembled as poet laureate, “Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry,” in Hunt’s ENGL/ETHN 242: Native American Literature and Culture. “An American Sunrise,” one of Harjo’s most recent anthologies, will also be read in that course as well as in ETHN 205: Native American Studies.
Another English faculty professor lauded “An American Sunrise,” describing it as another exquisite volume of new poetry that calls us to wake up in an American sunrise, with all its pain, inflicted wrong, experienced love and renewing beauty, to clear our ears of “junk advertising,” to remember “we are here to feed them joy,” and to ask “What are we without winds becoming words?”
The Library Journal shares this perspective on Harjo’s writing: “Defining the poet’s role as a ‘journey of truth, for justice,’ Harjo explores the role of the artist in society, the quest for love, the links among the arts, what constitutes family and what it means to be human.”
Harjo is the author of 11 books of poetry that include the highly acclaimed “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years,” as well as several plays, children’s books and nonfiction works and two memoirs, “Crazy Brae” and “Poet Warrior.”
