Indigenous Poetry featuring An Evening with Joy Harjo – G25080303
Joy Harjo is a poet, author, activist, professor, musician, and the first Native American to hold the honor of US Poet Laureate. Please join us as she weaves her poems and tells stories of resilience spanning her life and career, from her beginnings in Oklahoma to her time as US Poet Laureate, and shares her work as a scholar and advocate for Native poets and their place/land.
This workshop focuses on Indigenous poetry beginning with a reception and book signing with Joy Harjo on the evening of arrival. The following day will include readings/talks with Dg Okpik. In the afternoon, a curated selection of six poets from IAIA will present readings for a half hour each. That evening, Ghost Ranch is delighted to welcome Joy Harjo for an evening of poetry, stories and history about the land, ancestors and poets of this Native land.
The following morning, Sherwin Bitsui will close out the program with the final reading.
PLEASE CALL ANGELA at 505.685.4881 TO REGISTER FOR THE FULL PROGRAM OR SINGLE DAY OPTION. The full program option is Aug 17-19 for $200 & the single day option is Aug 18 and is $105.50 (lunch and dinner are included in the cost).
Instructors
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Dg Nanouk OkpikInupiaq-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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Joy HarjoJoy 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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Sherwin BitsuiSherwin 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.