She's taught creative writing across the West, including at the University of Arizona and the University of New Mexico, and traveled the world collecting accolades and awards, such as the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Now 61, with striking dark hair and a warm, husky voice, Harjo has written seven books of poetry - including She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War - and performed solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. But Harjo has spent decades exploring the connections between worlds in story and song. Most people don't wonder about the lives they might have lived before they were born into this one most of us don't go beyond abstractions such as "heaven" or "spirit" when we wonder about what follows our departure from this earth. The poet Joy Harjo claims to remember her struggle through the birth canal –– leaving a past world as a warrior with weapons in hand and entering this one "puny and female and Indian in lands that were stolen." When a culture starts losing that, or the culture no longer thinks it's important, then you know the culture is in danger." She says: "It's very important that all children, I think, and all people, have access to arts and are educated in arts. Vocation: Poet, playwright, writer and musician with Joy Harjo and the Arrow Dynamics Band, in which she sings and plays sax and flute. You could drive by and miss it." From her prose-poem book Secrets from the Center of the World (1989) I've heard New York, Paris or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. "My house is the red earth it could be the center of the world.
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