AN AMERICAN SUNRISE

A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land.

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared.
From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest - and most complicated - poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She graduated from the University of New Mexico and received her MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of Guggenheim and Rasmuson fellowships. Her many awards include the Wallace Stevens Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Jackson Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, the PEN Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, and two American Book Awards. She is also the author of a memoir called Crazy Brave.