Joy Harjo, a member of the Mvskoke Nation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a poet best known for her critically acclaimed books of poetry. “Born to a Creek father and a French-Cherokee mother” (Moyers 159), she lives a life deeply rooted in Native American culture of connection and celebration of the inner voice. As she states in her interview with Moyers, being part of a culture that still has living oral traditions and vital heroic figures and the inspiration of her aunt Lois Harjo Ball helped her develop this voice within her. Through this and her education, she discovered several muses that appeared in her writing process, such as the old Creek Indian, and found a motif - a round rocking chair from the Chicago Indian Center - that reappeared regularly in the corner. of his vision while various personalities from the Indian Center sat there to provide him with inspiration. More recently, her works won her the Wallace Stevens Award "for demonstrated mastery of the art of poetry" (poets.org) from the Academy of American Poets, and in 2009 she even won a Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year with her music. Apart from this, she is also a regular contributor to the "Comings and Goings" column of the Muscogee Nation News and is a professor of English and Native American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Stylistically, Harjo's poems are based on a combination of prayer, song, narration, and singing. In her book How We Became Human, she presents a range of variations of her highly descriptive, free-form poems, many of which convey messages that are both heartfelt and profound. Harjo uses both first and third person narrative in his poems, displaying a versatility of perspective through works like “For Alva Benson and for those who learned to speak” (Harjo 33-34) – with the third person – and “This Is My Heart” (167-168) – using a first person point of view. Some of his poems also use structural repetitions and repeated phrases, such as "Say I..." and "Say we..." in "Desire" (Harjo 81), as well as "This Is My Heart", with: "C is my heart. It's a good heart. It's my soul. He's a good soul. It's my song. It's my song. » Harjo's writings focus primarily on the topics of his Native American identity and personal survival, the twin realms of earth and the spirit world, and human connection. In “Crossing the Border,” Harjo recounts his experience crossing the Canadian border. She describes herself and her traveling party as "Indians in an Indian car, trying / to find a Delaware powwow / that was barely mentioned in Milwaukee" (Harjo 20-21), a group of 'Americans both originally from and separated from their country of origin. in the prejudices of which they are victims. Despite this injustice, Harjo continues to look at the world around him with eyes open to its beauty, praying to the "gods of scarlet light" (Harjo 127-128) and admiring how "the sun breaks on the yawning mountain" in “Songline of Dawn.” Likewise, Harjo is very sensitive to his spirituality, developing a sense of self-awareness and a belief in powers that exist beyond our physical realm. In her poem "The Path to the Milky Way Leads Through Los Angeles" (Harjo 141-142), she observes that "the shimmer of the gods / is easiest to perceive at dawn or dusk" and that "we must count for the strange god.” who imagines us as we turn /