An Evening with 23rd US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, February 26

Internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer Joy Harjo will present the 2026 Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture on Thursday, February 26, at the Powell Recital Hall in the Natalie L. Haslam College of Music on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville campus. Harjo’s presentation at 7 p.m. is free and open to the public. There will be a book signing immediately following the presentation. Please purchase books at your local retailer in advance of the event. Please RSVP at tiny.utk.edu/WDS2026.

This year’s Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture is hosted by the University of Tennessee Libraries, Friends of the Knox County Public Library and the McClung Museum. The lecture is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art.

A member of the Muscogee Nation, Harjo was the first Native American to serve as Poet Laureate of the United States (2019–2022).

She is the author of eleven books of poetry, including her most recent, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (2022). She also has written the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise (2019), which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association, and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her first memoir, Crazy Brave, was awarded the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award.

In her most recent book, Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age, Harjo encourages Native girls to use artistic expression to heal from difficult experiences. She has published award-winning children’s books and has edited three anthologies of Native literature.

As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. 

As poet laureate, her signature project, “Living Nations, Living Words,” championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. The project gathered the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. A companion anthology, Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, is available from the Library of Congress.

The annual lecture honors the late Wilma Dykeman Stokely (1920–2006), writer, speaker, teacher, historian, environmentalist, and long-time friend of the Knox County Public Library. Her papers are part of the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Tennessee Libraries. Speakers at the Wilma Dykeman Stokely Memorial Lecture represent a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and work, but all have a deep connection to one or more of Stokely’s passions: Appalachia, the environment, and racial and gender equity.

Support for Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Special thanks to our individual sponsors, poet Marilou Awiakta, and Dan Pomeroy, whose contribution is in memory of the late John Z.C. Thomas.

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[This story has been updated to reflect the change of location to the Powell Recital Hall in the Natalie L. Haslam College of Music.]