She began writing poetry when the national Indian political climate demanded singers and speakers, and was taken by the intensity and beauty possible in the craft. Her most recent book of poetry is the award-winning How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems. It wasn't until she was in Denver that she took up the saxophone because she wanted to learn how to sing and had in mind a band that would combine the poetry with a music there were no words yet to define, a music involving elements of tribal musics, jazz and rock. She eventually returned to New Mexico where she began the first stirrings of what was to be Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice when she began working with Susan Williams. Their first meeting occurred several years before in Blues Alley in Washington, D.C., a hint of things to come. 

Joy has published in magazines such as Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, River Styx, Contact II, The Bloomsbury Review, Journal of Ethnic Studies, American Voice, Sonora Review, Kenyon Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Greenfield Review and Puerto del Sol. She has made recordings, done screenwriting, given readings all over the world and is now performing with her own music. 

Joy has taught at Arizona State University as a Lecturer in 1980-81, at Santa Fe Community College as an Instructor in 1983-84, at the Institute of American Indian Arts as an Instructor in 1978-79 and in 1983-84. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado from 1985-1988, an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona in 1988-1990 and a Full Professor at the University of New Mexico from 1991-1995. She is currently teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles. 

Joy is a member of the PEN Advisory Board and the PEN New Mexico Advisory Board. She has been a member of the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium Board of Directors from 1987 to 1990, The Phoenix Indian Center Board of Directors in 1980-81, the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Grants Panel for the Fall of 1980, the National Endowment for the Arts Policy Panel for Literature 1980-83, the New Mexico Arts Commission Advisory Panel 1979-80 and 1984, and the National Third World Writers Association Board of Directors (which is no longer functioning).

Joy has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of The Americas. She has also received the 2003 Arrell Gibson Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Oklahoma Center for the Book.  How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems won the 2003 Oklahoma Book Award for poetry. Reinventing the Enemy's Language was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in 1998. In 1995 The Woman Who Fell From the Sky won the Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry. 

Joy was named Writer of the Year for children's books in 2001 by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for her book The Good Luck Cat. 

In 1998, Joy received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award to work with the nonprofit group Atlatl to bring literary resources to the Native American community. She has received the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1997. Joy Harjo & Poetic Justice received the Musical Artist of the Year for 1996-1997 for a CD Recording from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. She has received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1991 for In Mad Love and War, as well as the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America for the best book of poetry in 1991, and the Oakland PEN, Josephine Miles Poetry Award in 1991. She Received the Bravo Award from the Albuquerque Arts Alliance in 1996, the Oklahoma Book Award in 1995 for The Woman Who Fell from the Sky , the Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship in 1994, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT in 1993, and an Honorary Doctorate from Benedictine College in 1992. 

Joy has held National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships in 1992 and 1978, and received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University in 1991, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award in 1990, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1989, and an NEH Summer Stipend in American Indian Literature and Verbal Arts at the University of Arizona in 1987. 

Her work has been included in the Pushcart Prize Poetry Anthologies XV & XIII. She was named one of the Outstanding Young Women of America in 1978 & 1984. She has taken 1st Place in Poetry in the Santa Fe Festival of the Arts in 1980, the Writers Forum at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 1977 and the University of New Mexico Academy of American Poets Award. Joy also received the 1st and 2nd Place Awards in Drawing at the University of New Mexico Kiva Club Nizhoni Days Art Show in 1976. 

More information on Joy’s music and poetry can be found at her website. Her book, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, is available at Amazon.
 

Lily: How do you feel your poetic voice has grown and changed over the years?

JH: A poetic voice grows and changes naturally, according the human it springs from-- My first poems were very short, driven by single images.  Then they turned into longer prose like pieces.  Now I've turned back to the lyric and have been writing song lyrics, and scavenging my previously written poetry for song material.  I'm also writing stories. They too contain the poetic voice.

Lily: What are some of the unique challenges faced by Native American women, and how have these challenges impacted your artistic pursuits?

JH: As native women we are always dealing with the realities of our lives as human beings, along with having to constantly bump up against images of Indians that have nothing or nearly nothing to do with our lives.  My grandmother Naomi Harjo, a Creek Indian woman in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in the early 1900's played saxophone.  Now what does that tell you?

We have to juggle all the usual responsibilities of home, family, nation, work, art as well as concerns about the ability to continue to maintain as peoples in a country that still works out of a genocide mode.

Lily: Tell me what you’ve been doing lately in regards to your music, your writing, your life.

JH: I've been in the studio producing a new CD of music/song/poetry Native Joy for Real, which will be available on my website by mid May, working on a book of stories for a book coming out from Norton, teaching two classes this quarter at UCLA, traveling and performing--most recently MIT, then this week at the California Indian Education Association meeting in LA, then to Seattle next week, just finished an intro essay for the UCLA law students new journal and am editing an edition of Ploughshares, etc.

Lily: What is your advice to aspiring writers?

JH: Keep writing, and feed the source of the writing.