“THIS LAND”: A Reading Featuring Poet Laureate Joy Harjo

Join us for the opening evening of “THIS LAND” the 2021 Lannan Center Symposium. This event will be moderated by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan.

About Joy Harjo
In 2019, Joy Harjo was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold the position. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harjo is an internationally known award-winning poet, writer, performer, and saxophone player of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. 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 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.

About Maureen Corrigan
Maureen Corrigan is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism in the Department of English at Georgetown University. For the past 31 years, Corrigan has been the weekly book critic on the Peabody Award-winning NPR program, ”Fresh Air.” She is also a Mystery Columnist for The Washington Post and publishes regularly on NPR on-line and The Wall Street Journal. In 2018, she received the National Book Critics Circle’s Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

About “THIS LAND” 
“The title of next year’s Lannan Symposium, “THIS LAND,” will for many of us immediately evoke the lyrics of Woodie Guthrie’s best-known song, “This Land is Your Land.” Guthrie was an unabashedly political folk singer, one whose art imagined inclusive and non-proprietary ways of being attached to the land. The Symposium will be an opportunity to think together about a renewed politics of the land and about the role of literary art in building this politics. How can we ensure that this land endures to support future life and flourishing? How can this land be remade for dispossessed indigenous peoples as well as the dispossessors, for new immigrants as well as old, for nonhuman as well as human life, for you and me?”
–Daniel Shore, Symposium Director

For more information, visit: https://lannan.georgetown.edu/symposia/this-land