Internationally recognized poet, author, musician, and playwright Joy Harjo will read from her work on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus as part of the Writers in the Library reading series. Harjo’s reading on Monday, January 23, will take place in the John C. Hodges Library auditorium at 7 p.m. The reading is free and open to the public.

Harjo is the author of fourteen books, including eight books of poetry and two chapbooks. Her most recent book of poems, Conflict Resolution with Holy Beings (W.W. Norton, 2015) won the Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of American Poets. Other well-known volumes of poetry include How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, In Mad Love and War, and She Had Some Horses. A few of her many honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. For A Girl Becoming, a young adult/coming-of-age book, was released in 2009.

Harjo is currently working on a play, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, forthcoming from Wesleyan University, and Song Lines of Justice, a historical memoir, for W. W. Norton. Her musical play, “We Were There When Jazz Was Born,” has been commissioned by the New York Public Theater. Harjo has released five award-winning CDs of original music and in 2009 won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year for Winding Through the Milky Way. Her most recent CD release is a traditional flute album, Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears. She performs nationally and internationally with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has received a Rasmuson US Artists Fellowship and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Harjo writes a column, “Comings and Goings,” for her tribal newspaper, the Muscogee Nation News.

Harjo was appointed to a Chair of Excellence in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2016. She brings to the Creative Writing Program and to the university expertise in Native American studies, as well as distinction in poetry, creative non-fiction, drama, children’s books, and music. Her public service is as extensive as her publications. Currently she is co-judging the 2015 National Book Award in poetry.

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Writers in the Library is sponsored by the UT Libraries and the Creative Writing Program in association with the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. For more information contact Erin Elizabeth Smith, Jack E. Reese Writer-in-Residence at the UT Libraries, at esmith83@utk.edu.

Visit http://library.utk.edu/writers for a complete schedule of Writers in the Library readings for the 2016-2017 academic year.

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