Joy Harjo (1951--) :: Artist Poet Joy Harjo Biography Essays

Satisfaction Harjo (1951- - ) Satisfaction Foster was conceived in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May ninth, 1951 to Wynema Baker and Allen W. Cultivate. She is an enlisted individual from the Creek clan, and is additionally of Cherokee, French, and Irish plummet. Plunged from a long queue of innate pioneers on her father’s side, including Monahwee, pioneer of the Red Stick War against Andrew Jackson, she frequently joins into her verse subjects of Indian endurance in the midst of contemporary American life. In 1970, at 19 years old, with the endowments of her folks, Foster took the last name of her maternal grandma, Naomi Harjo. As she frequently credits her distant auntie, Lois Harjo, with showing her Indian character, this name change may have helped her to cement her open connection with this legacy. Albeit basically known as a writer, Harjo imagines herself as a visual craftsman. She left Oklahoma at age 16 to go to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, initially contemplating painting. Subsequent to going to a perusing by artist Simon Ortiz, she changed her major to verse. At 17, she came back to Oklahoma to bring forth her child, Phil Dayn, strolling four squares while in labor to the Indian medical clinic in Talequah. Her girl, Rainy Dawn, was brought into the world four years after the fact in Albuquerque. For a considerable length of time, Harjo upheld herself and her youngsters with an assortment of occupations: server, administration station chaperon, medical clinic janitor, nurse’s aide, move educator. She at that point proceeded to win a B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico in 1976 and a M.F.A. in verse from the University of Iowa’s celebrated Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1978. She at that point went on to a great rundown of training positions starting with the Institute of American Indian Arts and completion with her present situation with the American Indian Studies Program at the University of California at Los Angeles. Harjo is an honor winning artist many occasions over. She has won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the Oklahoma Book Award in 1995 for The Woman Who Fell from the Sky and in 2003 for How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America for and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for In Mad Love and War (1991), among different honors.