Don’t miss the Big Read this May 20! Join us as we celebrate US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise, the Festival’s choice as the 2021 NEA Big Read. Harjo’s poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living amid the ruins of injustice.
A descendant of storytellers and “one of our finest—and most complicated—poets” (Los Angeles Review of Books), Harjo continues her legacy with An American Sunrise: Poems. 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, Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history, confronting the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared.
Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise is available for check out via our OverDrive electronic library here.
Check out the information on this upcoming event on the New Haven Patch here and at the Arts and Ideas Festival website here. We look forward to seeing you there!