THE FIELD OF STORIES
SEATTLE TO Tulsa is a three-day journey by road. From the saturated green coast of fiddlehead ferns and roadside waterfalls to long, arid rings of inland prairie, mountains, and rivers of all description, all must be crossed. As Joy Harjo and I talk from our respective homes, her warmth makes the space diminish; I imagine the road between us beginning in Seattle, where I am, and crossing the Cascade mountains, to the towns of Cle Elum, Deer Lodge, Crow Agency, Cheyenne, Wichita, and Tonkawa. Cross the Arkansas River and there is Tulsa. The road is overlaid in concrete and numbered, but the paths have always been here.1
Harjo is a traveler and a community leader whose experiences drive her storytelling. “My creative life, I have come to understand, finds energetics in traveling, either physically or through knowledge gathering,” she says, and these voyages inform the passages of poetry and prose in her new memoir, Poet Warrior, published in September by W. W. Norton. The book is told in six parts, and each movement opens for readers a different doorway to understanding the way lives and places intertwine.
Born in Tulsa, Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including An American Sunrise (2019), Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), and In Mad Love and War (1990), all published by W. W. Norton. Harjo’s first memoir, Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012), won the 2013 PEN Center USA prize for creative nonfiction. She has also published a children’s book, The Good Luck Cat (Harcourt Brace, 2000), and a book for young adults, For a Girl Becoming (University of Arizona Press, 2009). More recently she served as executive editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations, published in August 2020.
Harjo is also a noted saxophonist and vocalist who performed for many years with her band Poetic Justice and currently plays saxophone and flutes with Arrow Dynamics. She has produced seven award-winning music albums, including . She has taught creative writing at the University of New Mexico, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institute of
