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Our 2020 Conversation with Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo—the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, saxophonist, member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the woman who held that laureateship longer than anyone in decades—breaks down why joy isn't escape, it's resistance.

This conversation pulls from her work that refuses to separate poetry from music, grief from celebration and survival from beauty. Harjo, who lost her mother young, played jazz in honky-tonks to pay for college and still writes poems that make you weep and dance in the same breath.

In this Love As A Kind of Cure 2020 recording, you'll hear Harjo talk about what it means to carry ancestors in your words, why a saxophone is as much a storytelling tool as a pen, and how Indigenous women have been practicing joy as revolution long before anyone gave it a hashtag. This isn't inspiration porn—this is a masterclass in staying soft in a hard world without breaking.

From the poet who gave us "She Had Some Horses," played backup for her own readings, and reminded a country that this indigenous land--Turtle Island--now known as the United States, had poets long before it had a name. Here's Joy Harjo on memory, music and why joy might be the most dangerous thing you can claim.

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