Date: 
Wed, 04/14/2021 - 7:00pm to 8:00pm

Poetry and heritage are alive and intertwined in Joy Harjo’s signature project as America’s first Native Poet Laureate. Living Nations, Living Words is an interactive map and accompanying anthology of Native Nations poets and poems from across the country, speaking to themes of displacement, visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Join Harjo and award-winning poet Layli Long Soldier for a conversation about the cadence, topography, and lineage of poetry.

  • This program is free to all with registration. Registered guests will receive the link to watch via email in advance of the premiere.
  • The conversation will be pre-recorded and premiere on YouTube on April 14th at 7pm central time.
  • Your support makes this programming possible and accessible – please donate now to help sustain these conversations and connections.
  • All CHF's virtual events have closed captions. To request another accessible accommodation, such as ASL interpretation or audio description, please reach out to us at access@chicagohumanities.org. We will do our best to accommodate late requests, but to ensure a service provider is available, please try to make your request at least 2 weeks out from the event date.
  • This conversation will be pre-recorded, but the presenters will still answer your questions! Please submit questions here.
  • To improve your experience on our website, we are currently building a new ticketing system. In the meantime, you'll notice different ways of registering for upcoming winter events. We know this can be confusing and we appreciate your patience as we build a better platform. Please reach out to tickets@chicagohumanities.org with any questions–we have a small staff and promise to reply as soon as we can!
  • Please register to receive a link to the digital event - https://www.chicagohumanities.org/events/joy-harjo-living-nations-living...

The program is presented in partnership with the Native American Support Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Poetry Foundation.

Living Nations, Living Words by Joy HarjoAbout the Book:

  • The Chicago Humanities Festival is pleased to partner with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, a not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling.
  • When you purchase your copy of Living Nations, Living Words from Seminary Co-op you are directly supporting independent bookselling in Chicago and a vital space for book browsing, discovery, and community.

Order your copy of Living Nations, Living Words today!

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo’s nine books of poetry include An American Sunrise, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, and She Had Some Horses. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave won several awards, including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. She co-edited two anthologies of contemporary Native women’s writing: When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through and Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Native Women’s Writing of North America, one of the London Observer’s Best Books of 1997. She is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize from the Poetry Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the United States Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. A renowned musician, Harjo performs with her saxophone nationally and internationally, solo and with her band, the Arrow Dynamics. She has five award-winning CDs of music including the award-winning album Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears, and Winding Through the Milky Way, which won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. Harjo’s latest book is Living Nations, Living Words. In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position.

Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in  POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American PoetThe American ReaderThe Kenyon Review OnlineBOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award and the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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