Indigenous Poetry featuring An Evening with Joy Harjo – G25080303

Instructors

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  Joy Harjo
  

  Joy Harjo

  Joy Harjo, the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate and member of the Muscogee Nation, is the author of ten books of poetry, several plays, children’s books, two memoirs, and seven music albums. Her honors include Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lily Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she lives.

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  Dg Nanouk Okpik
  

  Dg Nanouk Okpik

  Inupiaq-Inuit poet Dg Nanouk Okpik was raised in an adoptive Irish German family in Anchorage, Alaska. She earned a BFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast College. Okpik’s lyric pastoral poems are set in her native Alaskan landscape and concerned with movement and sensory precision; she often incorporates elements of mapmaking and mythology. In a 2013 review of Corpse Whale for terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments, Dorine Jennette observed, “In okpik’s hands, the English-language lyric’s usual associative distances are radically compressed, so that persons and animals are one, places are one, times are one. It is difficult to discuss separately time or space or form-of-being in Corpse Whale, as okpik renders all such boundaries fluid. Each poem is a plunge into deep water.” Her debut poetry collection, Corpse Whale (2012), won the American Book Award. Her work has also been featured in Effigies: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from the Pacific Rim (2009) and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (2011).

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  Sherwin Bitsui
  

  Sherwin Bitsui

  Sherwin Bitsui, a Diné (Navajo) from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, of the Bįį’tóó’nii’ Tódi’chii’nii clan and born for the Tlizilłani’ clan, received an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program. He is the author of the poetry collections Dissolve (2018), Flood Song (2009), and Shapeshift (2003). Steeped in Native American culture, mythology, and history, Bitsui’s poems reveal the tensions in the intersection of Native American and contemporary urban culture. His poems are imagistic, surreal, and rich with details of the landscape of the Southwest. Flood Song is a book-length lyric sequence that explores the traditions of Native American writing through postmodern fragment and stream of consciousness. Bitsui has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He teaches at Northern Arizona University.

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  Myles Miller
  

  Myles Miller

  Myles Miller is a Diné artist located in Santa Fe, NM pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). He writes fiction and poetry, focusing on the human condition. He also is an artist that works with both dry and digital mediums. He has a strong love for making beadwork and jewelry. In his work, Myles is passionate about giving people something to think about. Outside of school and art, he enjoys reading from the piles of books he’s accumulated and listening to music

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  Kamella Cruz
  

  Kamella Cruz

  Kamella Cruz is from Ohkay Owingeh, Village of the Strong People, in Northern New Mexico. She is a Tewa matriarch and a mother of five. Cruz holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Cruz is a national facilitator with the Native American Budget & Policy Institute out of the UNM. Cruz has presented for the White House Council on Native American Affairs, Sociologists for Women in Society, United National Indian Tribal Youth Conference, GearUp West, and is an invited poet with the Health Equity Council. Her writing appears in Yellow Arrow Journal, Terrain.org, Tribal College Journal and Gift of Animals. Cruz is an Assistant Creative Writing Professor at IAIA

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  Carl H. Tuzroyluke
  

  Carl H. Tuzroyluke

  Carl H. Tuzroyluke is an Alaskan Native and First Nations writer and artist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has a passion for creating poetry, screenplays, photography, and ceramics, which reflects his Tlingit, Nisga’a, and Inupiaq ancestry blended with his life’s experiences of love, exploration, and recovery. Carl is a double major at the Institute of American Indian Arts, earning a BFA in Studio Arts and Creative Writing with a minor in Cinematic Arts

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  Carmen Wiley
  

  Carmen Wiley

  Carmen Wiley is a Mvskoke (Creek) poet from southeastern Oklahoma. Her work is place-based, often exploring how land and language carry the weight of identity, history, and home. Drawn to inheritance through lineage, her practice lies at the intersection of personal and collective memory, grounded in tender nostalgia. Carmen’s work has been published in McAlester Poetry Club’s 2022-2023 Anthology, IAIA’s 2023-2024 Student Anthology, and Artisans of Nations. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts

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  James Thomas Stevens
  

  James Thomas Stevens

  James Thomas Stevens – Aronhió:ta’s (Akwesasne Mohawk) was born in Niagara Falls, New York. He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and Brown University’s graduate C.W. program. Stevens has authored eight books of poetry, including, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations, A Bridge Dead in the Water, The Mutual Life, Bulle/Chimere, DisOrient, and The Golden Book, (SplitLevel Texts). He is a 2000 Whiting Award recipient and Full Professor in IAIA’s undergraduate Creative Writing Program. He lives in Cañoncito, New Mexico