Poet of Native American Roots to Read at Smith

The Poetry Center at Smith College presents poet Joy Harjo at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 12, in Davis Ballroom, reading her poems and playing the alto sax.

An enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Tribe, award-winning poet Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, studied at the University of New Mexico and received an MFA from the University of Iowa.

Her rich multicultural lineage -- Harjo's mother was Cherokee, French and Irish and her father was Creek -- figures in her poetry, which explores the relationship between past and present, humans in their communities and the many aspects of the self.

"I turn and return to Harjo's poetry for her breathtaking complex witness and for her world-remaking language: precise, unsentimental, miraculous," writes poet Adrienne Rich.

Harjo's books include "She Had Some Horses" (1983), "In Mad Love and War" (1990), "The Woman Who Fell from the Sky" (1996) and, released early this year, "A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales." This latest collection charts the murky territories of sexual abuse and unbearable Native histories. Bittersweet and unsentimental, it is a tale of survival, of traversing the darkness to finish her map to the next world:

And it is all here. Everything that ever was.
The cawing, flapping song of the beautiful dark.

In the dark. In the beautiful perfume and stink of the world.

Co-editor of the recent anthology "Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women Writers of North America," Harjo is recipient of the American Book Award, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writer's Circle of the Americas. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.

In addition to her literary pursuits, Harjo is a founding member of the band Poetic Justice, whose latest CD is titled "Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century."
During her visit at Smith, she will offer up some jazz saxophone along with her poetry.

The event -- which is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible -- is co-sponsored by Native American Women at Smith, the Certificate Program in Native American Studies and the Dr. Josephine White Eagle Cultural Center at the University of Massachusetts. The reading will be followed by bookselling and signing. For more information, contact Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413)585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, Director, at (413)585-3368.

Contact: Marti Hobbes, mhobbes@smith.edu

November 29, 2000