Joy Harjo performs as part of Syracuse Symposium

Joy Harjo performs as part of Syracuse SymposiumNovember 10, 2006SU News ServicesSUnews@syr.edu

Internationally acclaimed poet, writer and musician Joy Harjo plays saxophone for the audience during her performance Nov. 9. Harjo visited campus as a guest of the 2006 Syracuse Symposium, “Imagination,” presented by Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. Harjo, a saxophonist and recording artist of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, performed and read from her work.

The Joseph M. Russo Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, Harjo has published seven acclaimed books of poetry, including “She Had Some Horses” (Thunder Mouth Press, 1985), “In Mad Love and War” (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” (W.W. Norton, 1984) and the most recent “How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems” (W.W. Norton, 2002). Her awards for poetry include the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award; Oklahoma Book Awards, 2003; the American Indian Festival of Words Author Award; and the 2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award.

Harjo’s first music CD, “Letter From the End of the 20th Century,” was released in 1997 and honored by the First Americans in the Arts for outstanding musical achievement. She released her most recent CD, “Native Joy for Real,” in 2004. Harjo has performed internationally and has served on the National Council on the Arts.

The symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival that celebrates interdisciplinary thinking, imagination and creation.