Poets & Writers Theater

In this 2023 National Book Festival event, Joy Harjo, author of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (Norton, 2022), and Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023), read from their work and discuss writing about nature in a conversation moderated by NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe. Dungy’s essay “Manifest Some Magic: Get Out of Your Own Way and Do the Darn Thing” is included in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I’m carrying this for America, but for Indigenous peoples in particular,” says Joy Harjo about what it means to be the first Native American to serve as the poet laureate of the United States in this 2019 PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown. A Q&A with Harjo about her new memoir, Poet Warrior (Norton, 2021), appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“If we could just stop, and listen,” begins Joy Harjo in a conversation about how stillness, gratitude, and kindness can help heal America in this Super Soul Sunday video with Oprah Winfrey.

“Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. / Remember language comes from this.”​ In this video from the Academy of American Poets, Joy Harjo reads her poem “Remember” from her 1983 collection, She Had Some Horses. Harjo has been appointed to serve a second term as poet laureate of the United States and is the first Native American to hold the post.

“With all writers, with all artists, with all humans, we all carry ancestors. We carry stories. We carry their songs.” In this video, Joy Harjo, Esther Allen, and Michael Cunningham speak on the impact of receiving creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). For more on the NEA’s positive impact on writers, read “Vote of Confidence: The Life-Changing Support of an NEA Fellowship” in the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance,” reads Joy Harjo from her poem “Grace” in this 2019 reading at the offices of the Academy of American Poets.

“This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.” In this video that originally aired in 2012, poet Joy Harjo reads “Perhaps the World Ends Here” for PBS NewsHour.